Another Review at MyShelf.Com

The Home

by Scott Nicholson



      Freeman Mills is a twelve-year-old boy with an awful past. His mother was supposedly murdered by his father, who is in a mental institution. Freeman exhibits a variety of psychological problems and is sent to Wendover Home - a treatment facility in the Southern Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. But Freeman quickly discovers that something is horribly wrong at Wendover.

After being subjected to bizarre medical experiments by his father, Dr. Kenneth Mills, Freeman finds that beyond his ability to read minds, his psyche has been hot-wired into a dark and frightening place called the "deadscape." The deadscape throbs with unearthly power from the basement of his new home. Its previous tenants, mental patients subjected to inhumane and abusive treatment, are still trapped inside their former prison - even though they're dead. Shock treatments, administered by Dr. Richard Kracowski to the children of Wendover, cause them to be able to see into the troubled world that surrounds them. But the spirits they encounter are not related to the forever friendly "Casper." There are no happy ghosts here - only the tortured souls of the insane. The children cannot ask for help from the outside because a group, calling themselves "The Trust," has plans for Dr. Kracowski's "Synaptic Synergy Therapy." The youngsters are little more than guinea pigs offered up as sacrifices for The Trust's corrupt designs.

Scott Nicholson steps once more into the darkest regions of our own fears and pulls us in with him. The Home is horror at its best...or worst. Nicholson pulls back the covers of our nightmares with writing that keeps the reader invested in his plot - and characters who are achingly human in the middle of mind-numbing terror. Even if we want to pull the bedclothes back over our heads, we can't. We care.

Beginning with his first novel, The Red Church, a horror classic, Nicholson proves once again that he has rightfully claimed a spot as one of the best writers of his particular genre.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The Book

Pinnacle Books
August 2005
Mass Market Paperback
0786017112
Horror
More at Amazon.com
Excerpt
NOTE: Explicit Language and Violence

The Reviewer

Nancy Mehl
Reviewed 2005
NOTE: Reviewer Nancy Mehl is the author of Graven Images and Sinner's Song.
© 2005 MyShelf.com