Garden of Evil

February 25, 2013
Frustrated professor Jim Rook finds his psychic gifts an ambiguous asset in his eighth horror-lite tale (after Demon’s Den). On the first day of class, Rook finds the corpses of a girl and eight Persian cats nailed to a classroom ceiling. As more deaths occur, sinister student Simon Silence, son of a donor to the college, woos Rook by showing interest in his ability to talk with supernatural entities. Masterton’s heavy-handed injection of signals about Simon’s preternatural nature erase any tension as Simon tempts classmates to pursue their own “personal paradise.” After much agonizing, Rook incautiously uses the Silences’ powers to resurrect his father, who drowned himself, and his murdered daughter. As the revived dead rampage through Los Angeles, Masterton hammers home the message that nobody achieves everything they want without cost, and Rook’s final weighing of sacrifice vs. salvation underscores the central issue yet again. Even adolescent readers will find the moralizing overly blatant and tiresome.

April 1, 2013
A supernatural tale pits an English teacher against an adversary who may just be the devil. The students who enroll in Jim Rook's remedial English class at West Grove Community College have no idea what's in store for them from Day 1. It's not so much that these kids are particularly ignorant or ill-prepared for the real world, though they are both, as that bad luck seems to follow Jim wherever he goes. As the world's only true medium, Jim frequently finds himself embroiled in supernatural situations. The apparent ritual murder of a college student whose body is whitewashed and suspended from the ceiling of his classroom suggests this semester is dishing up more of the same. Whoever perpetrated this crime evidently wants to make it personal for Jim, who has an unexpected tie to the victim. Though Jim feels certain that the death is related to the mysterious Simon Silence, the son of a cult reverend and one of Jim's latest crop of students, principal Ehrlichman refuses to remove Simon from the class. Without warning, Jim finds himself drawn into a world in which he is expected to question good and evil and must make a choice between the two. As he's forced to decide, more people close to Jim are drawn into the drama, and it's not clear who will make it out alive, including Jim's usually well-loved cat, Tibbles. Though Masterton's (Festival of Fear, 2012, etc.) plot moves well and is action-oriented, the condoning of generally abnormal human interactions by all hands may make readers wonder what, in this world, normal is.

COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

February 15, 2013
Remedial English teacher Jim Rook's first day of the new term doesn't go smoothlynot at all. First. he nearly runs over someone who's inexplicably walking in the middle of the road (also inexplicably dressed entirely in black). But that's nothing compared to what he discovers in his classroom: the naked body of a woman pinned to the ceiling, surrounded by the bodies of eight Persian cats. Rook calls upon his unique psychic gifts to get to the bottom of the mystery, but if he'd known just how far he'd have to go, he might have stayed away from the whole thing. The eighth Rook novel succeeds, like its predecessors, because its protagonist is just an ordinary guy who's a bit different from most other people. He's not a superhero or a psychic warrior; he's a community-college teacher who occasionally gets mixed up in events of an otherworldly nature. Masterton, a horror-genre veteran, shows us again why he's been around as long as he has.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)