Tower Hill — the fictional setting for Sarah Pinborough’s latest novel, not coincidentally called TOWER HILL — is a small, coastal New England town not far from Bangor, Maine. Its major landmarks are its ancient church and small college — Stephen King country, as readers will quickly recognize. Sadly, the setting is not the only familiar component of this earnest but derivative work.
Liz and Steve are boarding housemates and freshmen at the Tower Hill university. Steve comes from a troubled life in Detroit trailer parks, while Liz is a native of Maine and the daughter of two overly protective and deeply religious parents. They both immediately find part-time jobs and adjust themselves to life as college students in their new town.
Meanwhile, a new priest has arrived at the church, along with a new
history professor at the college. But as we learn in the opening
chapter, Father O’Brien is not what he seems. He and the professor are assuming new identities in order to search for buried artifacts and continue their shadowy mission. It isn’t long before the influence of both of these men changes the behavior of the Tower Hill residents. Liz and Steve, however, are among the few who do not fall under their spell. Instead, they become the alarmed witnesses to the two strangers’ task, which includes mutilation and murder.
By this point, any devoted follower of horror fiction will experience an uneasy sense of dé jà vu. It’s the Resurrecting of Long-Banished Forces, a theme that goes back at least as far as Lovecraft’s Elder Gods and repeated in countless works that attempt to unleash Satan or similar agents of evil. It is always the work of those who discover ancient artifacts containing forbidden knowledge. And there are always the innocent townspeople or bystanders who become the enlisted vessels of this resurrection. And always the few brave souls who must use their weak and limited resources to foil this attempt to take over the world.
Pinborough tries to dress this theme in new clothes with her concept of the decedents of Adam and Eve struggling to regain the God-like immortality and wisdom promised before the fall of Eden. She even has the two agents of the resurrection find the artifacts during their time as soldiers in the post-9/11 Middle East. But all these biblical references and the secret guarding of the artifacts throughout history still lead to the same climatic, overblown rituals full of fire, earthquakes, bolts of light, speaking in strange voices and dissolving flesh.
The characters and dialogue are, for the most part, believable and
effective. But Pinborough’s style feels one-dimensional and lacks the intensity needed to truly grip her reader’s hearts and throats. And she fall embarrassingly flat whenever she strains for a poetic metaphor: “Outside the streets of the town were empty, as if the bloodless veins of a corpse.”
She is by no means a bad writer. Given an original plot idea or
theme, she has all the potential to be considered a major talent. This new work, unfortunately, is not a step in that direction. —Alan Cranis
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• THE TAKEN by Sarah Pinborough
