All aboard, horror fans! Bentley Little’s back with THE BURNING, a novel with four rotating narratives about a ghost train, whose route bears death and damnation at every acursed stop.

The stories involve Angela, a Hispanic college freshman whose exposure to a strange mold turns her friends against her; Jolene, a newly single mom who encounters voices in the graveyard and a terrifying vision in her bedroom window; Dennis, a young Chinese man making a soul-searching cross-country trip, with a stopover at a chilling roadside attraction; and Henry, a park ranger haunted by shadows of Asian twins that arouse him and drain him of seed. And the ghost train shall scare them all.

Sound nuts? Remember, this is Little, the man who once wrote about a boy who shat diamonds and offered no explanation as to why. With him, the only guarantee is to expect the unexpected and not worry about logic and justification. Other than that, all bets are off, which is why THE BURNING is a near-perfect excursion into epic frights.

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of the novel is the FBI’s investigation of the life-taking locomotive after it desecrates graves and defaces national monuments. But nothing will prepare you for the Grand Guignol greatness of what I’ll just call “the playground scene.” It’s a sheer masterstroke of disturbing terror that catches you off-guard and forces you to witness every bloody moment.

It’s rare for a horror novel to have the message that this one does (and no, I’m not spoiling it), and even rarer to not get preachy about it. But even Little’s loyal fans often criticize him for his endings, and that holds true here as well. Though these four characters’ tales eventually fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, the resulting picture is still a bit scrambled. THE BURNING’s conclusion is a letdown, given all the outrageousness that comes before it, but sometimes the ride is more pleasurable than arriving at the destination. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.
Discuss it in our forums.

“She’d been on her bed, completely naked in a way he’d never seen her before, legs spread wide, while the Chinese servant lapped at her sex like a dog. The Chinaman was naked, too, and when Alice saw Williams standing apoplectic in the doorway, and knew that she had been discovered in her sin, she had grabbed her lover by the shoulders, pulled him up and taken him inside her, gasping as his engorged organ pierced her ready opening. It was a direct taunt, a deliberate slap at his manhood, and if he had not been wearing his sword, things might have turned out differently.”

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• FOUR DARK NIGHTS by Bentley Little, Douglas Clegg, Christopher Golden and Tom Piccirilli