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Loading... The Town That Forgot How to Breathe: A Novelby Kenneth J. Harvey
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. This was pretty good, especially the first part, it was hard to put down but the writing was so well done I didn't want to rush through. Very creepy, little glimpses that wet the appetite and kept you turning the pages. It lost some momentum, and I started getting annoyed with the father. The premise started out really good, but for some reason fell kinda flat towards the end. It's hard to put my finger on when the story unravelled and lost it's forward motion. It's a concept that's never been done and for that I give it 4 stars. (  )beeg | Apr 8, 2009 |  1   This book has the makings to be great: a mysterious breath-thieving affliction, preserved corpses washing ashore, ghosts and lost love. Unfortunately, these elements never seemed to come together to contain my interest. I started this book with high hopes and forced myself to finish it. Although there were gripping parts that left my hair standing on end, there were not enough moments like that to compel me further into the tale. The momentum is suddenly lost again and again, leaving the reader frustrated. There are stories that do this and it actually works in favor of the novel, but something is desperately lacking here. It may be the sheer fact that there is just too much going on. From one minute to the next a new event was occurring, each one bigger and more detailed than the last. There are far too many characters to keep track of once everything begins to unfold and the story becomes a bad sci-fi flick about halfway through. In the end, the reason for the characters forgetting how to breathe is completely lost within a jumble of other disturbances. Nothing here seems tied together, which is very unfortunate because the writing is actually quite good. I didn’t hate it, but would not recommend it. The textured and haunting cover art is clearly what is selling this book. Also, I find the title painstakingly silly. (  )nellebabe | Feb 8, 2009 | ShelfMonkey | Jan 3, 2009 | **Warning! May Contain Traces of Spoiler!** mmeh... it was OK... it never really affected me in any way. I was never significantly chilled and the story didn't linger in my mind in between sittings at all. There was too much that was left unexplained (although, admittedly, I am a little slow on the uptake sometimes...). I would have preferred having the explanations behind the conflict to be a little more explicit. Although some of the characters were interesting (I loved Ms. Laracy), I found them all a little too passive or resigned throughout the story. IMHO, it would have been a better focused story if one character could have truly and significantly "grabbed the reins". It would have been great to see it all though Joseph's eyes, let's say, but he "checked out of reality" halfway through the book, never to return (really). Chase didn't do a damn thing in the whole book. French was mostly wishy-washy. The only person who came close to playing detective was Dr. Thompson, but then he'd always get sidetracked by his injuries, his preoccupation with food, or his cat!? (oh, and I forgot about his brief bout of incontinence!... bad fish anyone?) And finally, the moral of the story is... spirits no like electricity! Turn lights and TV off, then spirits happy and they visit proper and play nice like civilized ghosties. Then everybody breathe good and remember to fish! mmeh... ( )sunny_jim9 | May 18, 2008 | I'm not sure if I liked this book, but I know that I couldn't put it down. The first half was especially good, and Harvey sure knows how to set the scene... but it seemed to lose direction as it gained momentum towards the end. Overall, though, it was very well written, and if you like a really well developed, creepy setting, this is worth the read just for that. The town of Bareneed in remote Newfoundland is not what it used to be - the fishing plant, the lifeblood of the community, sits unused. Moreover, people begin to get sick with some sort of breathing disorder that stumps the local doctor. As the sickness escalates, other strange events start happening around town as well. (  )paghababian | May 15, 2008 | 0.099 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com From Amazon.ca (ISBN 0312424809, Paperback)With no more cod to fish, Bareneed, the setting of Kenneth J. Harvey's powerfully eerie The Town That Forgot How to Breathe, has become another Newfoundland outport village on the wane. As one character laments, "Bareneed, once a lively and warm place, now stank of drabness and heartbreak." It's not much of a magnet for tourists, but it has attracted two visitors for the summer: a fisheries officer and his young daughter. Deeply pained by the recent break-up of his marriage, Joseph fails to notice the more curious aspects of the town. It takes him a while to hear about the townsfolk who've been dropping dead for no apparent reason. He's also slow to realize that his daughter Robin's new playmate is the ghost of a drowned girl. When he and Robin find an "exceptionally ugly" sculpin at the end of their fishing line, Joseph again tries to stay calm. But then he takes a closer look at his catch. "Feeling his fingers turn warm while he tried to disengage the hook," Harvey writes, "Joseph whisked them away. Flesh-coloured fluid seeped from the sculpin's wide mouth. A solid object began edging out as he wiped his fingers on his pants--a flesh-coloured sculpted orb, topped with something that resembled hair, matted in mucousy clumps." The porcelain doll's head that emerges from the fish is one in a series of unsettling sights in Harvey's book. As more and more objects are expelled from the sea, Bareneed's most painful secrets come to the surface.By setting his story in this desolate Atlantic locale, Harvey seeks to do more than add regional flavour to a Stephen King-style tale of an ordinary community plagued by inexplicable events. Instead, the terrors that Harvey describes are rooted in very real psychological and societal traumas. What makes The Town That Forgot How to Breathe so cunning is the way Harvey uses the horror genre as the basis for a provocative defence of Newfoundland's imperiled cultural traditions. Even though his ornate prose style can sometimes get waterlogged in the scenes between the shocks, Harvey has created a book that is as compelling as it is unique. --Jason Anderson (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:17 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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