Review: Disappearance at Devil's Rock

Disappearance at Devil's Rock by Paul Tremblay
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Gosh, my luck with books lately has been tough.

I read Paul Tremblay's A Head Full of Ghosts and fell in love. It was one of the early books that really turned me onto horror, a genre I never thought I could enjoy because I'm such a scaredy-cat. The novel was so well-done, with so many references to other works and layers.

So I excitedly moved onto Disappearance at Devil's Rock, hoping that it would meet my expectations, and it didn't.

To start, the premise was, from the get-go, not as interesting as A Head Full of Ghosts, so there was some ground to make up, but it was possible to salvage a great plot from the child disappearance premise. Grady Hendrix did it in My Best Friend's Exorcism, and created a great and suspenseful story. However, Tremblay failed here to keep my interest because Tommy disappeared and then nothing really happened.

Further, the character development was incredibly weak. I would get Tommy, Luis and Josh mixed up for longer than was acceptable, and I didn't feel that any of the other characters were adequately characterized either.

The plot points that could have been cool: torn diary pages, a mysterious devil-like figure, just fell flat. I was so uninspired by the book that I almost stopped reading, but at that point I was so deep in, that I just kept plodding through.

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