We at BOOKGASM have a rule: It doesn’t matter how old she looks; check her I.D.
No, wait, that’s a rule from a club I belong to. The BOOKGASM rule is that if a book hasn’t grabbed you by page 100, you should probably toss it aside and move on to something else. I’ve been trying to get through Bentley Little’s new horror opus HIS FATHER’S SON, and I have to admit that I fudged the rule a little: I read through page 99 and quit.
That’s the last page of Chapter 8. I could have read the first page of Chapter 9, but it begins, “She fell in love with his hands,” so why bother?
The novel begins on a promising note. Steve Nye, all-around average guy and budding sociopath, receives word at work one day that his father has attempted to murder his mother and is now mind-melding with the wallpaper in the mental ward. Nye Sr. has galloped into dementia, making pronouncements like, “I suitcase the five and clown you,” as if they make perfect sense.
So what is this sentence? Pronoun, verb, noun, verb, pronoun. Steve doesn’t consider it to be any kind of a threat. Papa thinks he’s making sense, and it’s assumed by his doctors that his brain is substituting one innocuous word for another.
But then the old man tells Steve, “I killed her.” Pronoun, verb, pronoun. Suddenly, Steve thinks that his dad is saying exactly what he’s thinking, with no word confusion. Why would he think that? And why wouldn’t he ask a doctor about it? He doesn’t. Now I have no idea how the story winds up, because it unlocked my door and I fell out of the car right here.
Steve begins jumping to conclusions like an Olympian, deciding that his father must have murdered his first wife, and who knows how many other women, like a combination of the Black Dahlia killer and Jack the Ripper. And then Steve goes to question an elderly man who knew Mr. Nye back in the day, assumes the man has blackmail on his mind, and murders him.
Not to put too fine a point on it: WTF?
Again, Little may pull all this stuff together into a cohesive story, maybe on page 101, but through this first quarter of the novel, it all makes about as much sense as a health care death panel, with no clues whatsoever that the author is being tricky and clever, rather than lazy and bored.
Last point of discouragement and then I’ll go home: If Little describes Father Nye’s current condition once, he describes it every 10 pages. This feels like the kind of book you get when the publisher demands 400 pages of Stephen King and all the story has in it are 200 pages of Jim Thompson.
Pass. —Doug Bentin
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• THE BURNING by Bentley Little
• FOUR DARK NIGHTS by Bentley Little, Douglas Clegg, Christopher Golden and Tom Piccirilli
• THE VANISHING by Bentley Little
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