The Disappearance

One thing about having a super long To Be Read list of books is that some authors don't show up for large chunks of time. Bentley Little has been missed. And THE DISAPPEARANCE was the perfect way to catch up with him. Not as many supernatural elements in this story as most of his others but still spooky and scary.

Gary, his girlfriend Joan, and three other friends are all students at UCLA. They all decide to go out to Burning Man in the middle of the desert. While there, Joan vanishes. Hoping she got another ride home, Gary and his friends go back to UCLA where they discover that Joan has really disappeared. No more Facebook page, no more school records, nothing. Completely erased. Frustrated with the lack of help from the police who are show more hesitant to investigate a missing person who doesn't exist, Gary starts looking for her himself.

The book follows the theme for a Bentley Little book: a normal person has their life disrupted by "something bad". In this case though, the evil entity behind the something bad is a little easier to understand. I'm not going to spoil the story because when I found out, it both pleased me and disappointed me. The theme of being powerless while other forces ruin your life still exists. I enjoyed the hunt and the results. I also enjoyed how the book could have ended at about page 300 with a good ending but it didn't. That final 100 pages helped hammer in the reality of the situation. At the same time, the location of the final confrontation was figured out a tad conveniently. Realistic but convenient. A minor point that was easy to bypass in the big picture. An enjoyable book. I'm glad I'm at that part of my To Be Read list where Bentley Little will be making more appearances. show less

As noted by other reviewers of this book, it's pretty clear that Bentley Little books hit a few home runs, but have some strikeouts too with readers. Happily, this was the category of the former and not the latter for me. In "The Disappearance", Little weaves a genuinely creepy plot around the lives of 5 UCLA college students who become ensnared in the clutches of a cult led by its leader known as "Father".
Unbeknownst to the quintet, one of their members, Joan, once belonged to Father's cult but was able to escape. While the group is partying out at the Burning Man festival, the group is drugged and Joan is kidnapped by cult members. Her boyfriend, Gary, and the others are determined to find out what happened to her. From this point on, show more Little takes readers on a realistic look into the world of cults and their effect on its believers. There are a few dynamic plot twists that all culminate in a satisfying ending. show less

From Amazon:
When Gary's girlfriend Joan vanishes, calls to her parents' home yield only dead air. Her school records are gone. There is no longer any evidence that she even existed. Most disturbing of all is what Gary does find: a warning and a tantalizing clue, leading to a mysterious backward cult known as the Homesteaders. Now Gary may be the next to disappear.

My Thoughts:

This is a creepy book, which relies more on suspense and the author's ability to make the banal seem horrific. This book is more of a thriller, with a great story and characters you really care about. The story has a cast of mostly likable characters, a good dose of mystery and a great ending. What more could you possibly ask for?

I can usually count on Bentley Little to grab my attention and get my heart pounding from the very first chapter if not the very first page. This one just didn't do that for me. The first few chapters dragged a bit. Once it got going, it was an enjoyable, albeit predictable tale.

A group of UCLA students make the long drive to Nevada to attend the Burning Man celebration. They let loose and enjoy the party atmosphere around them. One morning, Gary, one of the students, awakes feeling drugged. He looks around find his girlfriend, Joan, is missing. His friends, Reyn, Stacy and Brian, awaken, all sharing the same drugged feeling.

They search the festival grounds and cannot locate Joan. They all need to get back to campus for class, so they head to the local police station and attempt to file a missing person’s report. Informed that a report cannot be filed until Joan is missing 48 hours, they reluctantly make the drive back to campus.

Once they arrive on campus, they decide to file a report with the local police. show more The police arrive and inform the group that Joan isn’t a student at the university. They log onto Facebook and discover that not only has her student record been deleted, but so have her social media accounts.

Gary begins to dig a little more into his girlfriend’s life and unveils a dark past. Soon he and his friends are all in danger, running from those who are desperate to remove all traces of Joan’s life in the “outside.”

The Disappearance is a bit of a departure from the horror fiction for which Little is known. That said, it still has the essense of a horror novel. It’s full of chilling suspense, intensified by extremely well-developed characters. Looking at other reviews, “fans” of Little criticized him for this shift in his writing, but I applaud him for his versatility!

So, if you are looking to take the leap into horror fiction, Bentley Little’s The Disappearance just might be the stepping stone you need! Highly recommended! show less

Not a typical Bentley Little novel. Little is famous for spinning stories that take a mundane, everyday person or place or thing and building the supernatural and horror around it. Here we have nothing more than a thriller novel. Sure its based around a religious cult which lends a bit of the supernatural to it, and their our hints that there is something deeper going on, but we never see it. Now while not his typical work and I hope he doesn't stray from his normal genre too often, I actually enjoyed this. It was a face-paced read and actually a fun book to read. Well done.

http://www.wordsforwords.com/2011/09/disapperance-bentley-little.html

I've already reviewed one of Bentley Little's books, so I'm not going to go into as much detail here. This story doesn't quite follow the usual plot of a person/corporation/entity/monster invading a specific person's life with horrific consequences. With this story, a group of friends in college take a weekend road trip, but Joan, the girlfriend of one of the group members, mysteriously vanishes in the middle of the desert. When the rest of the friends get back to campus, they find that her records have been deleted from the school system, her parents have disappeared, and her Facebook page has been deleted as well. It's as if she never existed.

Her boyfriend, Gary, enlists the help of his friends to learn what happened to Joan. But the show more local police don't seem to be interested, and the clues that ARE turned up point to a psychotic religious cult known as the Homesteaders that Joan and her family used to be involved in. I'm not going to continue on, because the plot is fairly predictable from this point out. Gary & his friends make some poor investigative decisions, but ultimately they find the Homesteaders, rescue Joan from The Father, who was orchestrating everything, and then wait for The Father to show up again for one final showdown.

Normally, I like Bentley Little, but this story felt plodding and predictable. Gary's devotion to this girl he had only dated for a few weeks felt unrealistic, even though I as the reader was expected to believe otherwise. The willingness of the other characters to go along with some of the ridiculously bad ideas was a bit unbelievable as well. I feel like someone at some point should have put their hand up and said, "Hold up, everyone. Does anyone else think this is a dumb idea?"

Because Bentley Little has written so many other books, most of them better written than this clunker, I don't know that I'd necessarily recommend this book to anyone interested in reading more of Bentley Little's work, unless they specifically asked for it. There are much better choices out there, and for a longer review of Little's strong points, see my review for The Policy. show less