Dead Spots

November 10, 2014
Breathless action and deep emotions carry this solid horror-fantasy, a fusion of Joseph Campbell and Stephen King. Mackenzie “Mac” Babin is directionless and clinically depressed after her son’s stillbirth and the disintegration of her marriage. She unwittingly enters a world of ghosts and nightmares when she steps inside an abandoned roadside café. Now on the wrong side of a “dead spot”—a trapdoor to a limbo between life and death, where fears, dreams, and imagination determine the landscape—Mac must navigate an apocalyptic, wraith-ridden version of present-day Texas while coming to terms with her own strengths. Handsome, solicitous Grant and rougher, more even-handed Lucas keep her company, but she’s not sure either can be trusted. Frater (the As the World Dies series) recalls her own experiences of grief and depression in the afterword, and she uses those travails to depict Mac’s underworld journey with real pathos, even if the adversaries and obstacles are rarely as suspenseful or surreal as a cast of nightmares calls for. Agent: Hannah Gordon, Foundry Literary + Media.

December 1, 2014
A woman grieving for her ruined marriage and stillborn child finds herself transported to a terrifying place of nightmare and fantasy in this novel by prolific horror writer Frater (The Mesmerized, 2014, etc.).Recently married and expecting her first child, 26-year-old Mackenzie Babin is settling into a happy life. The death of her son, inexplicably stillborn, tears her marriage apart and sends Mackenzie into a spiral of depression and anxiety. While driving away from her old life, she narrowly misses hitting a deer on a deserted back road and stumbles into a dead spot, a doorway to a place that lies between the worlds of the living and the dead, where fears and dreams all come true. A disciplined imagination can bring safety, but the slightest loss of control spawns vicious and very real nightmares. Mackenzie meets Grant, a mysterious man who becomes her guide through the dead spots, and begins to discover a previously unknown resilience and power of her own as she confronts a parade of graphic horrors. The terrors of the dead spots and some of the characters Mackenzie meets during her struggles are genuine pleasures, fondly re-imagined stock elements of the horror trade-serial-killer clowns, abandoned buildings, a reality that shifts in response to visceral fears-but the plot often shambles along without momentum, wandering from one violent or creepy vignette to the next with a peculiar lack of desire or need to drive it. Perhaps most frustrating is Mackenzie herself, positioned to be transformed into a heroine but unable to shake an infuriating helplessness and willful foolishness until very late in the game. A novel that offers enjoyable, if sluggish, entertainment for fans of re-imagined horror tropes.

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January 1, 2015

The stillbirth of her baby and breakdown of her marriage leave Mackenzie devastated and groping for a way forward. On the way home to stay with her mother she narrowly escapes a car accident and stops at a long-abandoned diner, amazed when it comes to life around her. A handsome man named Grant explains that she has stumbled into a dead spot and is now trapped in a nightmarish land between life and death. Dead spots akin to the diner can only be sustained by the will of the newly arrived, but there are vicious wraiths who prey on those souls like Mac. VERDICT While there are some decent scares in this horror novel by the author of the "As the World Dies" trilogy, the story line is a bit repetitive, and Frater's protagonist might frustrate readers who expect her to wise up far sooner than she does.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2015
Psychological horror feels as if it has taken a backseat to zombie thrillers for the past few years, but Frater, after writing a few zombie novels of her own, is delving into this other niche genre. Mackenzie Babin's life falls to pieces after suffering a sudden miscarriage. Grief destroys her marriage and career, and her emotional delirium lures her into the trap of a dead spot. In this surreal threshold between the living and dead, hidden within abandoned places once bustling with life, shape-shifting wraiths prey on the fears of the lost and destitute. Readers may have to bear with the book's opening chapters that clunk through exposition of the main characters' lives, but once the surreal horror starts, you are as trapped as Mackenzie in her tailored nightmare world. Expect only the most chilling, uncanny, grotesque phantoms of inhuman imagination to haunt every scene. Influences from the genre's greatest classics, such as The Shining or Silent Hill, are easily spotted, and Dead Spots follows nicely in their footsteps.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)