shrikekali's review
3.0
Disjointed…
I enjoyed the story but the writing or editing threw me off and made it harder than it should have been to follow.
I still give it 3 1/2 stars out of five!
I enjoyed the story but the writing or editing threw me off and made it harder than it should have been to follow.
I still give it 3 1/2 stars out of five!
tbr_the_unconquered's review against another edition
3.0
Horror fiction does not really need monsters. They take life in the most devious and dangerous place known to us : the human mind. The levels it stoops to and the terror it unleashes can make even the boldest denizen of netherworld pause for a second. On a humorous note, there was this cartoon that the New Yorker published following Donald Trump's proposed Muslim ban where the Devil sat on Trump's shoulder and said 'Whoa, Donald - you're scaring me, man."
As long as carbon based bipeds walk this planet, a shadow of such horrors will always walk with them Robert Dunbar's novel explores such depths of horrors in our mind in the isolated pine barrens societies of New Jersey.
They are called 'pineys', an isolated society of men, women and children who live deep within the pine barrens. Poverty, unemployment, malnutrition, murder, incest and death are rampant among them. They scour the forest for a livelihood during daylight and drink themselves to a stupor at night which sometimes inevitably leads to violence both sexual and otherwise. They are wary of outsiders and anything that has a touch of modernity which includes - medicine, science and even electricity. The gene pool being limited also means that inbreeding results in bringing forth children who are deformed physically and mentally. Within this already dismal ditchwater of human affairs also runs another tributary, one that carries very murky contents. It is a legend which has been haunting eastern US for centuries now : the Jersey Devil. Robert Dunbar does an excellent job at meshing together lore and fiction in this novel. His protagonists are not monster hunters but unfortunate individuals who try to grope their way out of this miserable existence of theirs.
The horror is not fully revealed at one go but keeps coming and going throughout the chapters. They are also extremely graphic and sometimes made me cringe a bit. The other fantastic part of the novel is the setting in the pine barrens, there is almost always an air of foreboding and danger that lurks among the pines. There were occasions where the author used your characters and then abandoned them a few chapters later and also a few threads which he did not fully tie up. This was one factor which left me a tad dissatisfied.
Recommended if you like a graphic horror novel.
As long as carbon based bipeds walk this planet, a shadow of such horrors will always walk with them Robert Dunbar's novel explores such depths of horrors in our mind in the isolated pine barrens societies of New Jersey.
They are called 'pineys', an isolated society of men, women and children who live deep within the pine barrens. Poverty, unemployment, malnutrition, murder, incest and death are rampant among them. They scour the forest for a livelihood during daylight and drink themselves to a stupor at night which sometimes inevitably leads to violence both sexual and otherwise. They are wary of outsiders and anything that has a touch of modernity which includes - medicine, science and even electricity. The gene pool being limited also means that inbreeding results in bringing forth children who are deformed physically and mentally. Within this already dismal ditchwater of human affairs also runs another tributary, one that carries very murky contents. It is a legend which has been haunting eastern US for centuries now : the Jersey Devil. Robert Dunbar does an excellent job at meshing together lore and fiction in this novel. His protagonists are not monster hunters but unfortunate individuals who try to grope their way out of this miserable existence of theirs.
The horror is not fully revealed at one go but keeps coming and going throughout the chapters. They are also extremely graphic and sometimes made me cringe a bit. The other fantastic part of the novel is the setting in the pine barrens, there is almost always an air of foreboding and danger that lurks among the pines. There were occasions where the author used your characters and then abandoned them a few chapters later and also a few threads which he did not fully tie up. This was one factor which left me a tad dissatisfied.
Recommended if you like a graphic horror novel.
iguana_mama's review against another edition
4.0
Posted at Shelf Inflicted
I hate New Jersey. It all started when I was 11 years old and I made friends with the new girl, Tammy. She was blonde, beautiful, and one of the toughest girls I ever knew. I learned she came from New Jersey. In my mind, the Bronx had to be one of the worst places in the world. For a brief time, David Berkowitz lived with his mother six floors below me. My father got held up twice while selling insurance to people who had nothing to insure. My mother was too scared to take the bus to the construction company in the South Bronx where she worked as a bookkeeper, so my dad had to drive her. In school, I had to go to the bathroom in a group of three while carrying a wooden paddle with a number on it. My fifth grade science teacher carried a big knife for self-protection before guns were fashionable.
So, if I lived in one of the worst places in the world and Tammy moved there, she must have come from a really, really bad place. People moved away from the Bronx all the time. No one ever moved there, until Tammy. When I finally got the courage to ask what terror had her fleeing New Jersey, she told me about the charred remains of a five-year-old girl that were found in the incinerator of the apartment building she lived in. OK, so I’m a brunette, but that incident quickly eradicated any fears I had about riding in the elevator with the Son of Sam and forever tarnished my image of New Jersey.
Reading The Pines certainly didn’t make me feel better about the state of New Jersey. A single woman raising her young and mentally disturbed son; a creature inhabiting the woods and committing a series of savage killings; the eerie silence and creepiness of the pine barrens that made my skin crawl with dread; and the flawed, mysterious and unsavory characters that brought to mind Southern Comfort and that banjo-playing kid from Deliverance.
This is a very creepy and unsettling story that was slow-moving at times, but captivated me and had me looking up everything I could find on the Pine Barrens and its inhabitants, the legend of the New Jersey Devil, and the “feeble-minded” Kallikak family.
Highly recommended for fans of literary horror.
I hate New Jersey. It all started when I was 11 years old and I made friends with the new girl, Tammy. She was blonde, beautiful, and one of the toughest girls I ever knew. I learned she came from New Jersey. In my mind, the Bronx had to be one of the worst places in the world. For a brief time, David Berkowitz lived with his mother six floors below me. My father got held up twice while selling insurance to people who had nothing to insure. My mother was too scared to take the bus to the construction company in the South Bronx where she worked as a bookkeeper, so my dad had to drive her. In school, I had to go to the bathroom in a group of three while carrying a wooden paddle with a number on it. My fifth grade science teacher carried a big knife for self-protection before guns were fashionable.
So, if I lived in one of the worst places in the world and Tammy moved there, she must have come from a really, really bad place. People moved away from the Bronx all the time. No one ever moved there, until Tammy. When I finally got the courage to ask what terror had her fleeing New Jersey, she told me about the charred remains of a five-year-old girl that were found in the incinerator of the apartment building she lived in. OK, so I’m a brunette, but that incident quickly eradicated any fears I had about riding in the elevator with the Son of Sam and forever tarnished my image of New Jersey.
Reading The Pines certainly didn’t make me feel better about the state of New Jersey. A single woman raising her young and mentally disturbed son; a creature inhabiting the woods and committing a series of savage killings; the eerie silence and creepiness of the pine barrens that made my skin crawl with dread; and the flawed, mysterious and unsavory characters that brought to mind Southern Comfort and that banjo-playing kid from Deliverance.
This is a very creepy and unsettling story that was slow-moving at times, but captivated me and had me looking up everything I could find on the Pine Barrens and its inhabitants, the legend of the New Jersey Devil, and the “feeble-minded” Kallikak family.
Highly recommended for fans of literary horror.
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