Part I: 8

Love the tone of the story already: two disgruntled men, bemoaning IBM layoffs and their respective bereavements. The premise is heavy, and until presents itself with a similar formula as Pet Semetary, though less straightforwardly, and from the perspective of an onlooker rather than the would-be necromancer himself.

Part II: 7.75

An incredible 140-page Lovecraftian interlude. This book leverages the “story within a story” device to an extreme that on paper seems untenable and unenjoyable, but is in fact quite easy to follow and augments the sense of “ghost story”. The stories flow from Rainer -> Jacob -> Lottie -> Reverend Mapple -> Howie -> Abe -> us in a cascade of “bro, don’t go into the haunted place” but underscored with a magnitude of grief and loss heavy enough to make us sympathetic to the fool who’s trying to bring his family back.

Part III: 7.75

Snapping back to the present time, the main two characters find themselves at the spot of Lovecraftian horror and engage in Lovecraftian rituals. It’s good, telegraphed, and lacking any significant “twist” or gut punch relative to Part I, and even Part II, but it does well to round itself out.

Some particularly good quotations:

For her to attack him here, the last bastion of his pride and self-respect, is the kind of betrayal of which only someone you love is capable

and

Around us, the twentieth century emptied into the twenty-first, one millennium flowing into another.

and

here they were, trying to adjust to their loved one’s having been wrenched from the category of the living and thrust into that of the dead

Surprisingly, it also contains at least 3 typos?

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