Twisted Christianity, witchcraft, murder, teenage bullying and a marvelous mixture of mystery harbor in the 5-year-old novel "House of Reckoning," Well worth the 60 cents I spent at my local Love Your Neighbor Thrift Store.
A crescendo of chaos bombards 14-year-old Sarah Crane's life when her father is sent to prison for murder. Without a mother, the girl becomes a foster child of over bearing Christians.
Crane's step brother and sister define unkindness. Blinded in Christian faith, Sarah's foster sister Tiffany, brother Zach and her guardian parents Mitch and Angie Gravey embrace old testament punishment and judgment upon her. The Gravey's do all they can to strip Sarah of her individuality and shroud her amazing talents as an artist.
Sarah's real father accidentally beats someone to death in a drunken stupor. Still amidst his drunkenness, he runs Sarah over in his truck while she's riding her bicycle. She is labeled the town gimp by her step father Mitch because of the injury to her hip which forces her to limp.
The Gravey's with their Christian love, take Sarah in to their home solely for the money people receive for accepting a foster child. They force Sarah to sleep outside in the cold fall of Vermont when she comes home late from school and lock her in the attic for being a tool of Satan, according to Angie.
Sarah finds refuge with her high school pal Nick Dunnigan, another outcast at the local high school. Her art teacher Bettina Philips is the town witch in the eyes of Mrs. Garvey whose ludicrous faith in the Bible destroys any good will or common sense she might have possessed if she ever thought for herself. Philips is the one adult in Sarah's life who keeps her spirits up and her drive for diversity and quest for a positive imagination intact.
The story gets cerebrally intense when Angie and Dan Connor, the father of her daughter Tiffany's boy friend set out to kill Sarah and Nick is a state of unwarranted fury, and the reader learns that Philips house was once 'Shutters Lake Institute,' a place for the criminally insane in the early 1900s.
Despite the highly adult themes and dabbling in the occult, New York Times best selling author John Saul wrote this book without profanity while sagaciously making R rated material into PG format. Reading 2009's "House of Reckoning" was like watching a movie. Each character was rich in description and the story constantly switched my emotions from anger to joy over and over again until a very surprising conclusion lead my imagination into a dimension known as the twilight zone.
The conclusion of this novel is highly unpredictable and sends the reader on a mind adventure into the 5th dimension. In the immortal words of Rod Serling ...a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity, the middle ground between science and superstition which lies in the pit of human fears and the summit of our knowledge, the dimension of imagination in an area we call the twilight zone.
