Autocrafting

An editor with guts to cut and completely retool. One of the worst I have read by a mainstream, respected writer. This is a real shame as it starts out with promise. For the first few chapters you think you are finally going to read a good, chilling horror story about the residents of a high rise apartment block. To begin with, the characters are introduced in a way that you start to know and care for them and time is taken to set up a real spooky atmosphere that slowly builds. Then, after a lot of padding, we descend into the sci-fi and fantasy category and it's a real mess. Here, yet another horror writer fights against the fact he does write horror and tries to mix one terrible cliché of bubbling, spewing, mutated creatures from one silly genre into the next. The story, all told over the period of a few hours, is one

With Caution

Performance was fine and only inhibited by the material he had to read.

85% of them. Character development comes to a full stop as more and more people are introduced all the way through, leading to a melting pot of one dimensional bores. Some live, some die, you won't care.

This book could've been amazing, instead it's just another one of those promising chilling stories that turns out to be government conspiracy/ alien invasion, etc (that's an example, no spoiler there). Dean ties up the ending in a pretty bow, telling you from a mile off what he is about to do so as to kill any suspense you may be bothered to have left. This book, like his last, shows signs of lesser horror writers like John Saul than it does Koontz or King, and is another reason why people dismiss the horror genre as pulp.