Tag Archives: Jonathan Maberry

Maberry’s ‘Ghost Road Blues’ has some King in it

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You’ve heard of Christmas in July? How about some Halloween in April?

If that sounds good to you, I’ll recommend Jonathan Maberry’s “Ghost Road Blues.” It’s not a new book but it’s new to me. I sought out Maberry’s book because I enjoyed his zombie thriller “Dead of Night” and wondered what he could do with something on a grander scale.

With three books in the Pine Deep trilogy — “Ghost Road Blues” is the first — Maberry has written a story that, at least in the first volume, feels like something from Stephen King. With supernatural lurking in the shadows of a small town and all-too-human characters nearly outdoing the monsters for evil — even while an apocalypse draws near — “Ghost Road Blues” reads like some of King’s best, including “The Stand” and “Salem’s Lot.”

Best of all, it gave me a real feeling of Halloween approaching — without the actual onset of winter not far behind.

“Ghost Road Blues” takes place in the town of Pine Deep, Pennsylvania, in the weeks leading up to Halloween. The holiday is an important one because the town is famous for its over-the-top celebration of Oct. 31. The town attracts thousands of visitors from the eastern U.S. with its shops, restaurants, haunted hayrides and ghostly attractions.

Three characters are central to the novel: Crow, a former cop and recovering alcoholic who runs the hayride attraction and owns a holiday-themed store; Val, Crow’s lifelong friend and girlfriend; and Terry, another lifelong friend who’s also mayor of Pine Deep.

Into the mix this year comes a carload of drug dealers, thieves and killers led by Ruger, a mass murderer wanted by the authorities up and down the East Coast. Ruger and his cohorts end up in Pine Deep as they try to elude police.

Crow, Val and Terry have a lifelong bond because of something they experienced as children 30 years ago: A mysterious serial killer struck Pine Deep, killing Terry’s little sister and leaving all three survivors scarred.

Town vigilantes ostensibly killed the serial killer but in reality they killed a black drifter, the Bone Man, who was innocent. In fact, the Bone Man himself had earlier dispatched the killer.

What none of the players know: The killer from 30 years ago was the embodiment of evil and now he’s back, ready to begin where he left off.

“Ghost Road Blues” is nearly 500 pages long but rarely lets up. Crow and his friends are great, sympathetic characters and Maberry puts them through the wringer. It’s hard to imagine what he has in store for them in “Dead Man’s Song” and “Bad Moon Rising,” the remaining books in the trilogy.

Like King, Maberry draws some of his best characters from flesh-and-blood types, including Iron Mike Sweeney, a teenage monster movie fan who is befriended by Crow. Iron Mike, who prefers to live in a fantasy world in which he is a hero, is as lovable a character as you could ask for.

On the other hand, Iron Mike’s stepfather, Vic Wingate, is one of the most detestable characters I’ve read in a long time. Iron Mike lives in a fantasy world because Wingate is a brutal bully, abusing Mike and his mother.

But Wingate is something else as well. He’s the right-hand-man of the evil force, long believed dead, manipulating the modern-day players.

With its moody imagery of corn fields, pumpkins and lonely farms, “Ghost Road Blues” perfectly captures the macabre melancholy of small-town Halloween. It’s a genuine treat even well in advance of the ghostly holiday.

Cops and zombies: Jonathan Maberry’s ‘Dead of Night’

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Shambling and slow as they might be, we just can’t get away from zombies.

There’s “The Walking Dead” on TV — the biggest hit on cable — and “World War Z,” the movie version of Max Brooks’ terrific book and starring Brad Pitt, to come out later this year.

And there’s Jonathan Maberry’s “Dead of Night.”

Maberry is a writer of suspense fiction, comic books and thrillers that take their cue from biological warfare and the queasy possibilities of modern-day laboratory horrors.

In “Dead of Night,” Maberry does a couple of things I’ve not seen in a zombie book before.

He gets inside the mind of a couple of zombies — yeesh — giving readers a feel for the zombie perspective.

And, most interestingly and importantly, he approaches the possibility of a zombie apocalypse from the perspective of small-town cops dealing with its early stages.

Think about it: Most zombie books and movies, even if they have a small-town or isolated setting, include characters who know the big picture.

While Maberry’s story has those characters, it follows, especially early on but throughout the book, the street-level shock troops dealing with the beginning of the end of the world.

Maberry’s small-town Pennsylvania cops and TV reporters don’t know, at least for a while, that a plague of zombies has broken out. They only know that a couple of people have been killed, in grisly fashion, and that a couple of bodies have disappeared. A suspect is on the loose, but it takes a while for them to realize that the suspect and the missing corpse are one and the same.

The characters try to puzzle this out but thankfully never seem oblivious to the mayhem developing around them. As a matter of fact, there’s nothing like a previously dead body attacking you to change your perspective.

“Dead of Night” is a well-written thriller with appealing, made-for-cable-TV characters and situations.

The ending is open just enough to allow for a sequel. I don’t know if Maberry is planning one, but I’m ready to rejoin the zombie hordes if it happens.