This is another classic horror novel. It made Farris a household name after the release of the Brian de Palma movie in the seventies. That was long before I was born or could read, but it reached me through the grapevine of an eager reader. I searched endlessly for challenging and daring material, and this was one of the earliest I found.
It starts off as an action-story, but quickly moves away from that, into far more satisfying waters. It isn’t a horror-story, not really a genre story at all, and I quite simply love that, love that, too. John Cassavetes played the sinister highly placed government man in the movie, but he had lots of great original material to work with. It is no hero-story. The reality in the story come off as quite cruel and gritty. In a typical Hollywood story, the boy’s father would have succeeded in his grim mission with flying colors, but he doesn’t. The boy and the girl are the main protagonists, even though it doesn’t look that at first. There is no moral here, or if there is none, it’s far different from the usual boring, mainstream stuff.
We are presented with a reality beneath the somewhat pleasant daily existence where there are no rules, no mercy. We are drawn into a world of agents and victims, and both casual and deliberate violence. Powerful people want to become even more powerful by exploiting an emerging power, but this power is both beyond their understand and reach. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio. The before mentioned highly placed government man realizes that to his peril.
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