James A. Moore’s THE PACK: SERENITY FALLS, BOOK II has the unfortunate position of being the middle child in a trilogy. The first book, WRIT IN BLOOD, drops you head-first into a world of horror; I’m assuming the third, DARK CARNIVAL, provides the punch. THE PACK, however, is all buildup.

Serenity Falls, if you’ll recall, is a small New England town with a long history of murder, rape and other acts of violence, going back to the colonial times when townspeople burned a witch alive. Whereas WRIT followed elderly Simon MacGruder as he investigated that history for a book, THE PACK primarily focuses on a motley crew of local tweens and teens, both good and bad, dealing with the unexplained mass disappearance of their peers, the town’s dogs turning into crazed Cujos and the dead’s newfound inability to stay dead.

Meanwhile, the town drunk gets sober to best seek revenge of his wife’s murderer, and Jonathan Crowley, the stranger who rolled into town at the end of WRIT, shows up about 200 pages in to kick some supernatural ass. The problem is that the book ends up telling maybe half a story, while its predecessor told at least a dozen. While it’s essential, I’m sure, for the trilogy as a whole, it does not work well as a stand-alone. I wasn’t bored by it, but some resolution would have been appreciated. –Rod Lott

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