Glimpse

January 22, 2018
New Yorker Rain Thomas, the tormented heroine of this uneven supernatural thriller from bestseller Maberry (Ghost Road Blues), had sex for the first time at 15 with 18-year-old Noah, who shipped off to Iraq the next day. She later learned that she was pregnant and that Noah has died in an explosion. Under pressure, Rain gave up their baby for adoption. Years later, she still grieves for Noah and feels guilty about giving up the baby. Then things start to get really bad. She arrives early for a job interview, only to be told that she’s almost 24 hours late. Her disorientation at having blacked out and lost an entire day is compounded when she concludes that she hallucinated an encounter with an old woman who gave her a pair of glasses with a crack in one lens that have unusual properties: they allow her to see a boy who looks a lot like Noah. Maberry sympathetically depicts Rain’s struggle to maintain her sanity, but familiar genre material, including Rain’s battle with an evil figure whose name should not be uttered, soon overshadows the initially moving human story.

Starred review from January 1, 2018
Maberry, known for such sf/horror fare as the Joe Ledger novels and the one-two zombie punch of Dead of Night (2011) and Fall of Night (2014), steps a bit outside his comfort zone with this psychological/supernatural thriller. Rain Thomas, a recovering drug addict, seems to be missing a day: she went to sleep Thursday night and woke up on Saturday. But this is no garden-variety blackout. After she awakens, but before she becomes aware of the missing time, she experiences what she can only assume is a dream: images of a small boy being chased by a threatening . . . something. Later, as Rain tries to figure out how she could be missing an entire day, she is shocked to discover that a figure from her previous life, the drug-induced hallucination she called Doctor Nine, has somehow manifested himself and is chasing the boy Rain had seen in her dreama boy who, Rain now realizes, bears an uncanny resemblance to her former boyfriend, who was the father of the baby she put up for adoption 10 years ago. As reality and illusion collide, Rain must decide how far she is prepared to go to save the boy and herself. Maberry's narrative skills remain first-rate here, and his writing displays more subtlety and greater structural elegance than in past works. A success on all fronts.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A bold new direction for one of the giants of the horror genre, and one that could extend his already enormous audience still further.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

October 15, 2017

In this supernatural thriller from the New York Times best-selling Maberry, whose shelves groan with Bram Stoker Awards, recovering addict Rain Thomas thinks she sees a boy running through a subway. And he looks like the dead boyfriend whose child she gave up at birth.

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