The Narrows

The Narrows is a decent book but bit of a disappointment.

As my second read by Ronald Malfi, that's what you get for reading the most excellent Bone White first, which I rated five stars.

The Narrows isn't in the same league.

It's not as skillfully planned or written, suffers from superfluous filler in the middle of important action through mundane details, uses questionable editing/punctuation, and has occasional incongruous and sticky grammar such as 'had had' and 'on them then ate them' snippets of wisdom.

Published in 2012, the writing feels loose and amateurish and the difference between this and Bone White, 2017, is vast.

On the positive side it has an easy writing style with lots of accessibility, sets a suitably bleak scene and has - yippee - vampires in it. However, character development is lacking with barely any of the personalities being essential or likeable, with the exception the cop, Ben Journell. The town itself is dull, dead and dreary and not worth worrying about.

By establishing bleak and depressing hopelessness all the way through, what's the point of victory? What are we fighting for? If you suffer from depression or loneliness in real life - many of us do - this book won't terrorize you if you're scared shitless anyway, but repulse you because of the lack of joy or juxtaposition at how good life can be on the other side. It's necessary to shift from the light into the gloom, or from the doom into sunshine for horror to effectively work, and if it's nothing but darkness, what's the point besides a creepy and rather unsatisfactory read?

Being unlikeable and rarely scary are major negatives with The Narrows.

And what about the vampires?

Isn't there soft-wired lore about what vampires can and cannot do?

🙄 What's with the guttural spitting of disinfectant-type green gloop?

🙄 And the eating brains thing?

🙄 And small, regular spinal incisions?

It's fiction and you can do what you want but these are strange deviations.

Vampires hide away during daylight to later maraud at night - correct - with references to inviting them in before they can attack you, wooden stakes, rosary beads and traditional concepts, but as a vampire story it's way off.

It's like saying werewolves can't be slayed by silver bullets, or they chomp on tins of special Pedigree Chum to jump over mountains and howl at the moon.

Maybe Ronald Malfi is better at cosmic horror without the graphic descriptions?

And this book goes to show how much he's developed as an author since 2012.

It's only three stars from me because it rarely thrills or scares and sometimes feels a bit silly and amateurish, weirdly reminding me of Carrie by Stephen King as a great first attempt at unhinged action, but that's where comparisons end because Carrie is ace.

Fortunately, Ronald Malfi gets it right in later books and I recommend you explore beyond The Narrows.

I'm a big fan of his work regardless of this one being a bit of a duffer.

Onto the next...