The Tides

by Melanie Tem

Reviving people from the past is not an unusual occurance among the aging residents of the Tides nursing home, but when the facility's administer begins to dig into her own elderly father's past, she uncovers evidence of a malevolent past wife who may have returned from long ago to destroy them all. Original.

Genres: Horror, Fiction

308 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published August 1, 1999

About the author

Melanie Kubachko was born and raised in rural northwestern Pennsylvania. She received a degree at Allegheny College and went on to earn a master's degree in social work from the University of Denver. Apart from a varied career in social work she has published short fiction in numerous publications, including Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Skin of the Soul, and Final Shadows. Her work has also been included in such anthologies as Women of Darkness and Women of the West.

Married to Steve Rasnic Tem.

Reviews

[Charles Dee Mitchell · Rating 3 out of 5]

The malevolent spirit moving about The Tides nursing home is named Faye. We learn this in the first line of Tem's novel when Marshall Emig calls it out. He was once married to Faye, a dangerous woman in life and in death. It is perhaps his growing dementia from Alzheimer's that has given her an entree into the Tides. She uses such weaknesses to pass through the residents. She can exploit their illnesses, their addictions, their guilts, and their rage to make horrible things happen. And everyone, to some degree, is aware of her presence. She is a diaphanous shimmer easily mistaken for a trick of the unpleasant fluorescent lighting throughout the building, or the the fog that settles into the drained lake behind the home. She is sometimes in a room before one of the staff turns on the light. She taps with increasing frustration on the skull of a quadriplegic who still has the power to keep her out.

Rebecca Emig is Marshall's daughter and the director of The Tides. She is only twenty-eight and seems too young for the job. But she probably came cheap and the facility is run on a too-tight budget. She would possibly be out of her depth even without a malevolent spirit causing on old man to pour oven cleaner on his pancakes or provoking an alcoholic resident to rape an elderly woman who tends to make unsuccessful escapes for a home she no longer knows how to locate.

Tem's novel never finds a strong focus. Rebecca cannot really carry the narrative, and there are so many shifts in viewpoints that Faye's actions become predictable in the frequency if not their specifics. The deeper mystery of Faye, Rebecca, her father and her mother who makes daily visits is also revealed to early on to maintain any suspense value as the story unfolds.

But Tem's background as a social worker serves her well when it comes to creating characters that suffer real and saddening problems, both mental and physical. They cannot grasp what is happening to them, and the most frightening aspect of the novel is Faye's motivation. She just wants to have a good time, and that just happens to involve wrecking the lives of all those she comes into contact with.

[Ben Loory · Rating 3 out of 5]

i've been fascinated by the whole Melanie Tem / Steve Tem thing for a couple years, but now it's really starting to peak. his collection City Fishing (which contains "angel combs," one of my favorite stories) had him in the lead amongst the two for a while, but i think maybe she's starting to catch up (i mean in my mind; they've both been writing for decades). both of them are classified as horror, and horror they are, but it's such a weirdly factual and convincing horror it hardly seems connected to the rest of the genre (if such a thing can be said to exist). this book especially works almost entirely in browns and pastels (i'm talking feeling-colors here) instead of the usual blacks and white and reds and greens. the horror is the horror of reality, the horror of the actual situation (life, aging, disease, regret, sadness, loss, etc); there's no straining after irrationality or anything beyond or even particularly special. hard to explain, but it's really interesting stuff. finished it and went right out and bought another (Revenant). we'll see how that goes.

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

I felt like this book went around and around in circles. Every time I thought the plot was going to move forward and engage me in the story, Tem shifted back somewhere it seemed she had already been 25 or 50 pages earlier.

Perhaps some better editing or sectioning out of the chapters would have created better flow or added more coherence to the novel. As it stands, it's an OK book, but it's also nothing I'm too impressed by.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Research re-read

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad. Not great. A very slow and detailed creepy tale of a family who’s constantly haunted by a ghost of their past. Rebecca is the head administrator of a nursing home called The Tides. An incredibly demanding job which takes its toll on her personal life and her sanity. Dealing with older residents who have all sorts of issues including dementia, is even harder when one of them is your father. Even HARDER when a lot of horrible things happen to those residents that you can’t explain. And when those things start happening to you also, the line between what’s real and what is paranormal starts to get blurred. A very well written and detailed story, it was very boring at times and slow. And the ending wasn’t to my liking.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nursing home is king of the last stop for many hopeless cases, and it's such an interesting setting for a story of what seems to be a malevolant haunting and series of possessions. The narrator's tone is mild and detached while describing a series of accidents and deaths. And the thing is, so many of them could just be due to the lax management of the nursing home so nobody gets suspicious about anything. Some of the residents are outright evil on their own, no supernatural intervention needed. I really enjoyed this, even though it was a little slow and went on just a bit too long. The whole vibe was one of collapse and decay, with nothing going right for anyone. It really rewards patient reading.

[Kathleen · Rating 2 out of 5]

The characters are not well-defined. The plot is somewhat confusing. The story-line is far-fetched. It was just not a very good story. I probably will not read Tems again.

[Certified Not-Lame · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF page 76.

Monotonous and boring, another reviewer has called the writing ‘circular’ and I think that’s an apt description. So far most of the creepy, ghostly stuff in the story amounts to a character seeing a bit of movement from the corner of their eye, or hearing voices in their head/radio. Then rinsing and repeating. Lots of awkward jumps between character POVs sometimes in the middle of paragraphs. Lots of characters prattling on about mundane routines. Not a good introduction to the works of the Tems’.

[Kevin · Rating 2 out of 5]

A fantastic concept, with dementia written extremely well. Yet, the writing style seems to stay the same regardless of which character is foremost, making the whole thing too dreamlike. Also, I'm assuming the jumps in narrative are the fault of am editor who refused line breaks or anything in the chapters. Lots of confusion.

[Gretchen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disturbing. Very.
Nursing home under assault by demonic spirit.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Melanie Tem’s The Tides is a wonderful, big-cast spook story about a malevolent force that returns from the past to wreak havoc on the staff and inhabitants of a nursing home. It reminds me some of Joe R. Lansdale’s fantastic novella, Bubba Ho-Tep. It works in a different mode, but both use supernatural horror to highlight abuse and warehousing of the elderly.

[Cher · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel could have used a bit more editing, but Tem did a terrific job of characterization and motivation, which is something can make any horror novel really great. By showing how ordinary human foible and character defect can result in horrible tragedy, horror writers can make extraordinary events seem plausible, which is way scary.

I can't believe it took so long to find a Melanie Tem novel. I've been looking for years, knowing she was out there. I can't say this was one of the better novels I've read, but I can definitely see what people see in her. She has a keen insight into people.

[Susan]

Never finished.

[Suzanne · Rating 1 out of 5]

horrible. AVOID!