The Narrows

With books like \”December Park\” and shorts such as \”Skullbelly\” and \”Mourning House\”, author Ronald Malfi has mastered small town horror. \”The Narrows\” works as well, if not better, than \”Salem\’s Lot\” and recalls other \”town horror\” like a John Saul or Dean Koontz entry. It has an original and unique take on a horror sub-genre that fans cherish while creating memorable characters. I felt as much a citizen of Stillwater as Sherfiff Ben or Dispatcher Shirley. Character development, atmosphere as thick as fog and the looming sense of dread proves Malfi has no happy endings for this trip. I\’ll take a ticket to ride please.

The Narrows tells the story of Stillwater, a small town on a river which is suddenly dealing with unexpected horrors. As if the recent flood wasn\’t bad enough, now there are reports of dead cattle, missing kids, lots of bats flying around and all sorts of unpleasantness. The Narrows is a mixture of good and bad, shifting back and forth as the reader experiences the events as felt by a handful of characters. The writing is fine and parts of it were really gripping. But what I had trouble with is how much of it felt the same from one scene to the next as the tension was building. It seemed that there were always characters waking up only to discover something lurking just out of sight or strange noises. There are many references to windows or things shifting past windows. If you were to do a shot every time the author mentions windows, The Narrows would kill you, even if you spread your reading out over a week. Don\’t get me wrong, Malfi is a good writer and this book is readable but for me not as good as Bone White and far short of his masterpiece, December Park. 3/5

What a great author! Now I\’ve read everything except the one with bad reviews and I\’m heartbroken not to have another classic to read. On one level this is a classic monster book with creativity involved, like a Stephen King book. On another level it\’s about how society comes apart when unchecked corporate greed leads to environmental decimation. The chemical factory has poisoned the town and destroyed the genetics of many species. The factory is corporate greed and the town is its victim. Very interesting to read the book on both levels. You can just take the story at face value or you can see the underlying symbolism and message. Either way, you\’re in for a great ride!

First and foremost, I\’m a huge Ronald Malfi fan. I couldn\’t wait to finally get my hands on this novel since I didn\’t grab up a signed/limited copy. Was it worth the wait? Most definitely. The Narrows reads like a Malfi novel normally does. Very intricately worded and a steadily flowing story telling style that can\’t be beat. What this novel does past that, is create a world you become enveloped in, and feel part of the characters within. A small town with a history of flooding and hard times is struck with a bat infestation and troubled occurrences, some of which these flood waters have brought with them. Two young boys go on a little adventure to a side of town that is strictly forbidden, to look for a dead deer out of curiosity. After finding the deer though, one of the boys sees a man by an abandoned building, and thinks it is his long lost father who walked out on him and his family. Could it really be his father, or could it be something of another plane? When a local officer finds a floating child\’s body (this is the tie in from The Boy in the Lot, a free short story on your eReader), questions start to surface at the condition of the body, and what could have happened to create such a horrific sight. Shortly after, the young boy who thought he saw his father has up and disappeared. A woman is driving home from a night of infidelity, and strikes… something, with her car. In a fit of terror she finds a neighboring man and asks him to help her find the body of what she thinks is a young boy she hit. When nobody can find a body or blood, and only damage to her car, questions start to arise as to what it could have been. This novel strings together a cast of characters that only a storyteller like Ronald Malfi can truly put forth. He winds together a horror story with monsters of both the human and non-human kind throughout, and keeps the pacing at a steady stream, such as the flood waters in the small town in which the story is set. I want to elaborate more, but to tell a whole lot more would be a spoiler of the book. I would say this is definitely in my top three novels of his, and I\’m glad it finally came out for the masses in paperback. On top of that, to come from Samhain Publishing, the new home of Don D\’Auria is great, who many of you know, is of fame from the defunct Leisure.

The Narrows was a bundle of fun. If you enjoy Stephen King in the vein of short story \”Stand By Me (the Body)\” or the novels \”It\” and \”Salem\’s Lot\”, you\’ll enjoy Ronald Malfi\’s the Narrows. Like the King stories, the Narrow\’s takes place in secluded small town. Malfi does a great job of describing not just an isolation, but for lack of a better word, the sense of \”inbreeding\” that happens in a small town. The story begins simply: while exploring, two boys spot movement in an old, abandoned plastics factory; one of the boys believes it to be the father that recently left the family for a younger woman. It isn\’t. It\’s something far more nefarious. Good scary story, with a new and original evil. The Narrows is a great, old fashioned Halloween read.

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