The Ceremonies (1984)

Thirty-year-old Jewish guy saves the world, again. Mostly I liked this, though it would have been better at 400 pages instead of 500 pages. At its best it well-written and exciting with good characters. But the ending is unsatisfactory, both rushed and pat; it bogs down sometimes, and I can't believe those wasps couldn't find cracks to crawl through. ( )

The Ceremonies is an excellent novel of subtle horror. The emphasis there is on the word "subtle." If you prefer horror fiction with a fast pace and explicitly-described or gruesome events, this books is probably not for you. It's quite long, and from a certain perspective nothing much happens in it. There are portentious moments, ominous foreshadowings, and uncertain incidents, but things don't really move into high gear until the last fifty pages or so. The horrors of the novel are likewise restrained. I can't recall a single instance of violence or gore actually being described. Such moments are passed over.

Why, then, have I given the book five stars? For its marvelous evocation of tension and mood. The horror genre is often unjustly thought of as hackwork undertaken with no sense of style, but writers like Klein prove how unjust this judgment is. Every word and detail is carefully chosen to enhance the atmosphere of dread and wonder that the book builds up. Klein's influence here, whose work is in fact mentioned several times in the course of the novel, is Arthur Machen. Klein is no mere pastiche artist, but his use of straightforward prose and mysterious events to bring home the weird to the reader is reminiscent of Machen's classic "The White People."

The slow pace of the novel also allows Klein to build up his characters. This is not a character-centric novel; the conflicts and ambiguities in the relationships of the five major characters are used to enhance the overall mood of uncertainty and fear. The protagonists are all familiar and likable types without being stock figures; in a horror novel of this type, that's the ideal situation.

If I have any complaint about the novel, it's that the climax is a bit of a letdown. The tension has been building magnificently for more than 500 pages, and then the evil is dispatched with such speed and ease that one begins to wonder how dangerous it really was. Any long horror novel will likely run into this problem, and it's a minor one that in no way diminishes the remarkable effect of what has gone before. The Ceremonies is a masterwork of modern horror. ( )

loved loved loved. Great for old horror lit buffs (the books, not the fans) ( )