Weird things happening in a small town, but everything comes together in the end in a believable conclusion (of sorts). That alone makes it worth the read.

 

Also, this book has hints of Stephen King... actually, it's more like a bouillon cube of Stephen King. It has Stephen King flavorings, but stewed in a more fortified crock pot (if that makes any sense).

 

The familiar: sleepy small town, gossipy towns folk, gifted (read: not annoying) children, supernatural happenings, unusual deaths, mental illnesses, and animals with violent streak. What's different from the usual Stephen King fare is you get a bird's eye view of the the town and its inhabitants and you get to visit every character's life (main player's) and see events unfolding from his/her POV. Another thing that's different is the horror element. Often it's more humorous than scary. The central mystery has a real, not supernatural, culprit, and the conclusion is plausible and tidy, which you don't often see in Stephen King stories.

 

I can't shake the feeling that if this story was set in the 60s or 70s, it would have made more of an impact on the towns people and there'd be more of an ominous feel to the central mystery and deaths. Modern setting, technology, and crime-solving methods take away from the otherworldly feel of this sleepy town and its strange happenings.

I finished this book in two days, literally staying up until ungodly hours of the night to do so. Upon finishing, I can say it was a messy, creepy, action-filled suspense-y thriller set in a small New England town. However, while reading this book, I couldn't stop grousing!The novel opens dramatically: 'Nurse Spandex', a thirty-something nurse known for modifying her scrubs to make them more flattering, has just left after a fling with a doctor while on duty. Returning to the nursery, she's horrified to find a newborn baby missing, replaced with a massive corn snake. That frightening crime sets off a series of increasingly creepy and violent events in small town Brewster, a summer vacation town in Rhode Island, that culminates in a shocking and violent Halloween.The cast is enormous. We've got an Iraq War vet-turned-cop with broken heart and a bad attitude, a flaky and inexperienced but deeply moral small town journalist slash single mother, a series of quirky and inventive ten year olds, a gaggle of local and state police with various tics and quirks to make them memorable (cop who hums opera, cop who can't stop eating, townie cop who is racist, etc.), spunky old ladies and degenerate young men.Dobyns' writing style reminded me of Stephen King mixed with Michael Chabon, with a myopic focus on place and a strange almost meta-narrative style, excessively quirky characters propped up almost smugly, relentless action that was almost too much.As a result -- and my biggest complaint while reading -- is that despite the page length (my copy clocked in at 420 pages), everyone actually felt really thin. We were given shorthand for the character, some trite, some original, and you could see a mile away the character interactions. Women, I think, suffered the most. All young women were sluts -- multiple people told us this -- and even those who weren't actively slutty were still irresponsible (our single mother refuses child support because she got herself pregnant, not her and the guy, but whatever.) The romantic building up is straight out of rom-com -- two angry confrontations lead our intrepid journalist to dream about the cop being stepfather to her song -- while the sex is straight out of a Clive Cussler.I know, I sound super negative but, but, I couldn't put this book down. I really couldn't. I stayed up waaaaay later than I should to finish this, and it was worth it -- the mystery was satisfying, I guessed a few twists and not some others, and even the flimsy characters hooked themselves in me and didn't let go.Bloggers who do the RIP reading challenge in October will absolutely want to add this to their TBRs; anyone who likes Stephen King will want to pick this up. (King writes a gushy, literally gushy, review for this book. It's adorable.)

I was excited to start this one – Eliza at Penguin rarely guides me wrong. After the first few chapters, though, I was wondering what I’d gotten myself into. Things were going so s.l.o.w.l.y. Sure, there’s the snake-in-the-hospital-crib thing and the requisite hullabaloo that follows. And then I was like “Ok, what now?”“What now?” indeed. We get a lot of meet so-and-so, then so-and-so’s brief history, their “Where was I?” when the snake happened, and, for some, their “Oh crap! How do I cover this up?” after the snake happened. I was almost snoozing by the time the litany ended.Then Stephen Dobyns pounces, with a “Ha! And you thought there wasn’t any point to this!” And I got involved in the lives of all of these people I hadn’t cared about meeting earlier. This is when I went back and re-read up to this point, so you’ll want to pay attention from the get-go and save yourself the re-read time. Just FYI.Brewster is like any other small town, I’d imagine. It has its share of local flavor, and its share of small-town politics and problems. What it didn’t bargain for, however, is a missing baby. And when the police start investigating, they run up against rabid coyotes, stolen pets, scalped visitors, Wiccans, Satanists, ritual rapes, and one going-off-his-rocker stepfather and husband. All of which add up to hysteria in the populace, journalists looking for a scoop, and uniforms of various agencies stomping all over trying to figure out what the heck is going on…And when you find out what’s really going on under all the craziness, you’ll pretty much be amazed by Dobyns’ genius.Pick this one up – if you’re a fan of thrillers, you won’t be disappointed. The main characters are complex, the plot is complicated, and if you figured out whodunnit (and what’s going on) before you’re done with two-thirds of the book, you come back and let me know how. drey’s rating: Outstanding!

Full review up at
http://www.bookgasm.com/reviews/thrillers/the-burn-palace/...

Stephen Dobyns has an impressive back catalog of well-regarded poetry collections, a long-running detective series set in Saratoga Springs, and a handful of genre-jumping novels that invariably draw rounds of applause from jaded reviewers and mash notes from Stephen King.

So when the buzz escalates into a roar upon this novel’s publication — and it should — you may, like me, wonder how the hell you’ve failed to read a writer so richly, weirdly compelling. THE BURN PALACE is a fat blast, a sly, character-driven exploration of a town unraveling over the course of a few fall weeks, wracked by an escalating series of strange and often horrifying events.

The cold open follows Alice Alessio (known with a leer as “Nurse Spandex”), fresh from a(nother) naughty dalliance with a(nother) doctor, returning to the infant ward to find one child gone, replaced under the blankets by a snake. The plot — kicked into gear by a confused, terrified scream — has its own promiscuous fun with an array of horror conventions: rumors about devil worshippers, vampires, shape-shifters; a scalping; an increasingly-unhinged stepfather; a sidebar on wormholes; shady goings-on at a new age health club and an old folks’ home; Halloween.

.....

.