Memorials by Richard Chizmar

 

I grabbed this from the library because Chizmar's one of the people King's done some cowriting with recently, though I haven't read those books it's still enough to make me curious. Also, he's associated with a small press specialized in horror fiction that also publishes a much-awarded and otherwise respected horror fiction magazine, so he in principle should have some sense of the genre at least. Well, he does. This is a reasonably solid novel, it builds slowly, has decent characters, zigs and zags in some interesting and unpredictable directions without seeming overly complicated. It does take a disappointing Lovecraftian turn at the end, but that's disappointing to me, I might just be in a place where I don't need to see any of that crap for a while. It's set in 1983, and though Chizmar says in his afterword/acknowledgments that's because he graduated from high school in 1983 and had memories he wanted to reference, I'm sure it's at least as much because he wanted to isolate his characters and make their research more difficult. The novel didn't entirely work for me, but it's competently written and it seems to be more or less what Chizmar wanted it to be; take that for whatever it's worth.