by Douglas Clegg
Leisure Books 2005

Douglas Clegg has been writing about Harrow for a few years now, and he seems to be getting comfortable wit this setting. This book is his fourth in the series, as far as I know. The first three are MISCHIEF (2000), THE INFINITE (2001), and NIGHTMARE HOUSE (2003). You don't need to know much about the previous books to enjoy this one. All that you need to know is that Harrow is a bad place.

And Harrow is awake.

Following a brief atmospheric prologue, Clegg launches us forward, full-tilt boogie, as we accompany a trio of teenagers on their way to a midnight rendezvous in the halls of Harrow. Clegg intersperses the preliminary dialogue with dozens of allusions to horror movies. For a few pages you are going to feel you are trapped in a kitshchy-psuedo-cool paraphrase of a SCREAM movie. Oh goody, I thought, a light and fun beach read. I'd better stop thinking so hard.

Think again. Clegg only teases us with these opening chapters. It's just a warm-up for the real action. This book delivers a carnage-fest worthy of an all-night REANIMATOR fest.

Sleepy readers will need their No-Doz to keep up with Clegg's constant Tarrantino time and perspective shifts, as he swings his "camera" back and forth in a kind of uber-rashoman fashion. By page fifty or so, Clegg takes off his funny rubber mask and begins marching us straight into the mouth of the meat grinder. The ground round is flung with gusto. THE ABANDONED is definitely not a book for the easily offended.

THE ABANDONED is plotted around the "Springfield Syndrome" - if you live too close to a nuclear reactor, expect a little fallout. Harrow is awake, but we don't see a troop of hapless psychic reporters setting up camp in the dining room. Rather we see the infection of this "bad place" spreading to the nearby town of Watch Point. It reads kind of like a gene-spliced replicant of SALEM'S LOT, THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, and THE CRAZIES. A Sergio Aragones vision of hell. Every where you look there are bad things happening. This book has the manic frenzied energy of Keene's THE RISING. A heck of a good read.

I've been told that each of Clegg's Harrow novels is told in a different style. I've been told that I shouldn't judge the rest of the series by this one volume.

I don't know about that. All I do know is that THE ABANDONED was a quantum-page-turner. By the first quarter of the book I could not wait to open it back up and get reading. THE ABANDONED deserves to be read, with abandon.

I recommend it highly.

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