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mellabella's review
4.0
I got about 1/4 into this book only to realize that I read it years ago.
It wouldn't be the firs time that happened.
I love any story with folklore in it. I love handed down stories. "Greenjacks" are fascinating.
This books had an interesting, unique premise and good characters.
It was just creepy enough.
It wouldn't be the firs time that happened.
I love any story with folklore in it. I love handed down stories. "Greenjacks" are fascinating.
This books had an interesting, unique premise and good characters.
It was just creepy enough.
pacardullo's review
4.0
Fun, creepy "haunted house" read. The 400+ pages fly by, and you do care for all of the characters (well, except wonderfully nasty Aunt Jade) and care what happens to them. This keeps the stakes high and the the story moving along.
There are a couple of small issues, but both have mitigating factors that prevent them from being too distracting. Sometimes you wanted to smack the main character for not catching on sooner. Then again, he was dealing with a lot of things, so he can be excused. Additionally, while some of the language used for a trans secondary character may seem dated in 2020, the character's treatment was pretty progressive for 1994 when the book was originally released as "Panic."
All in all, this was an enjoyable "quick" read. It breezed along and was fun, creepy, and disturbing. Good stuff.
There are a couple of small issues, but both have mitigating factors that prevent them from being too distracting. Sometimes you wanted to smack the main character for not catching on sooner. Then again, he was dealing with a lot of things, so he can be excused. Additionally, while some of the language used for a trans secondary character may seem dated in 2020, the character's treatment was pretty progressive for 1994 when the book was originally released as "Panic."
All in all, this was an enjoyable "quick" read. It breezed along and was fun, creepy, and disturbing. Good stuff.
shelflife's review
3.0
My least favorite subject in books or movies is hauntings. However, this one was pretty good. I liked my characters and there was a certain amount of fun involved. It didn't seem to take itself too seriously.
michellereadatrix's review
3.0
Really torn on the stars to give -- I'd say 3.5.
The premise is good, the characters are likable, but the main character has to spend the book being thick as a brick for the events to happen.
Move into the house where you saw malevolent spirits as a kid? Where your parents were brutally murdered? Where you were convinced your brother was possessed? With all the secret passages? The house you cannot think about without nearly falling apart? Where animals die horribly? Where your incestuous, abusive, crazy aunt still lives? Where the food was often secretly defiled?
Yes, please, because it's a great place to raise kids?
To share the biggest thing he'd have to be stupid not to get would be a spoiler. It's okay, if you read the book, you'll know.
Also, the author really, really hates poodles. :) But likes cats.
Also2, the book being published 20 years ago made some of the stance toward LGBT character seem a tad, er, dated. Not crazy bigoted, just 20 years old.
A tendency toward general repetition that an editor should have fixed. This line was not, um, award winning"
Those houses had perfect paint and perfect yards, not a blade of grass out of place, while he had an award-winning collection of shaggy bushes and award-winning weeds.
The ending was pretty touching, so there's that. I thought of abandoning the book at 17%, but I actually did like the characters and was curious about what was going to happen.
The premise is good, the characters are likable, but the main character has to spend the book being thick as a brick for the events to happen.
Move into the house where you saw malevolent spirits as a kid? Where your parents were brutally murdered? Where you were convinced your brother was possessed? With all the secret passages? The house you cannot think about without nearly falling apart? Where animals die horribly? Where your incestuous, abusive, crazy aunt still lives? Where the food was often secretly defiled?
Yes, please, because it's a great place to raise kids?
To share the biggest thing he'd have to be stupid not to get would be a spoiler. It's okay, if you read the book, you'll know.
Also, the author really, really hates poodles. :) But likes cats.
Also2, the book being published 20 years ago made some of the stance toward LGBT character seem a tad, er, dated. Not crazy bigoted, just 20 years old.
A tendency toward general repetition that an editor should have fixed. This line was not, um, award winning"
Those houses had perfect paint and perfect yards, not a blade of grass out of place, while he had an award-winning collection of shaggy bushes and award-winning weeds.
The ending was pretty touching, so there's that. I thought of abandoning the book at 17%, but I actually did like the characters and was curious about what was going to happen.
xterminal's review
4.0
Tamara Thorne, Bad Things (Pinnacle, 1994)
I had thought the "classic" horror novel was dead. All the good stuff in the last decade or so has been splatterpunk, ecohorror, the horror of absence, and the like. The fine, atmospheric horror novel with one of the classic buggity-boos has been relegated to the short story, the Ravenloft novel, or (ugh) Anne Rice.
Or so I thought. Then I discovered the novels of Tamara Thorne. Bad Things is one of them. It's a novel about a haunted house, with shades of The Green Man thrown in for good measure. And it's a stunner.
Rick Piper, at the beginning of the story, is a good kid with a bad problem-he had inherited the family curse of being able to see the Greenjacks, little shadow-like creatures whose sole aim in life is to swap themselves with a human soul and inhabit the human's body. Only a few male members of the Piper clan can see them, and Rick is one of them. His twin brother Robin can't, and Robin, though basically another good kid, teases him about them mercifully. On Halloween during their seven-year-old year, Rick is attacked by Big Jack, the physical manifestation of the Greenjacks everyone can see, who can only form on Halloween night. In the process of saving Rick, Robin is knocked unconscious, and when he wakes up, he has become rather a nasty character. Has he been possessed by a greenjack, or did he suffer brain damage in the fall? The answer to this question haunts Rick, who eventually convinces himself (after fleeing the family estate to Las Vegas) that the greenjacks were all in his head, and that his brother was just an evil kid. All well and good until Rick, a widower in his forties with two kids of his own, wants to get his kids away from the easy, loose lifestyle of Vegas, and moves them back to the family estate, where he starts seeing little green men again...
Various pieces of Bad Things remided me, more than anything, of Paula Trachtman's extreme-horror classic Disturb Not the Dream (okay, it was extreme when it came out. Today it'd barely rate a PG if made into a movie. But that's beside the point). Big old haunted house, crazy relatives, secret passages, incest, dead animals (Tamara Thorne must really hate toy poodles, but then, doesn't everyone?), murky ponds, dead kids, ghosties, ghoulies, long-leggetie beasties, it's all here. While Thorne doesn't go to the same lengths Trachtman did, she adds on some wonderful twists, including the crossdressing best friend of the protagonist, Dakota, who plays combination psychotherapist and matchmaker for Rick; the old nanny, who has stayed on as caretaker and is one of the few people who really believes Rick is seeing ghosts; and, most notably, a refreshing absence of the token religious figure who faces the demons and is destroyed. (It's just too easy a cliché these days.) Thorne is one of those authors who can pen a five-hundred-page novel and have the reader turning pages and staying up late in the night to finish it over the course of a long weekend, and Bad Things definitely fits that mold. Thorne is one of the fantastic new voices in horror, and deserves to be heard by many more people than she has thus far. ****
I had thought the "classic" horror novel was dead. All the good stuff in the last decade or so has been splatterpunk, ecohorror, the horror of absence, and the like. The fine, atmospheric horror novel with one of the classic buggity-boos has been relegated to the short story, the Ravenloft novel, or (ugh) Anne Rice.
Or so I thought. Then I discovered the novels of Tamara Thorne. Bad Things is one of them. It's a novel about a haunted house, with shades of The Green Man thrown in for good measure. And it's a stunner.
Rick Piper, at the beginning of the story, is a good kid with a bad problem-he had inherited the family curse of being able to see the Greenjacks, little shadow-like creatures whose sole aim in life is to swap themselves with a human soul and inhabit the human's body. Only a few male members of the Piper clan can see them, and Rick is one of them. His twin brother Robin can't, and Robin, though basically another good kid, teases him about them mercifully. On Halloween during their seven-year-old year, Rick is attacked by Big Jack, the physical manifestation of the Greenjacks everyone can see, who can only form on Halloween night. In the process of saving Rick, Robin is knocked unconscious, and when he wakes up, he has become rather a nasty character. Has he been possessed by a greenjack, or did he suffer brain damage in the fall? The answer to this question haunts Rick, who eventually convinces himself (after fleeing the family estate to Las Vegas) that the greenjacks were all in his head, and that his brother was just an evil kid. All well and good until Rick, a widower in his forties with two kids of his own, wants to get his kids away from the easy, loose lifestyle of Vegas, and moves them back to the family estate, where he starts seeing little green men again...
Various pieces of Bad Things remided me, more than anything, of Paula Trachtman's extreme-horror classic Disturb Not the Dream (okay, it was extreme when it came out. Today it'd barely rate a PG if made into a movie. But that's beside the point). Big old haunted house, crazy relatives, secret passages, incest, dead animals (Tamara Thorne must really hate toy poodles, but then, doesn't everyone?), murky ponds, dead kids, ghosties, ghoulies, long-leggetie beasties, it's all here. While Thorne doesn't go to the same lengths Trachtman did, she adds on some wonderful twists, including the crossdressing best friend of the protagonist, Dakota, who plays combination psychotherapist and matchmaker for Rick; the old nanny, who has stayed on as caretaker and is one of the few people who really believes Rick is seeing ghosts; and, most notably, a refreshing absence of the token religious figure who faces the demons and is destroyed. (It's just too easy a cliché these days.) Thorne is one of those authors who can pen a five-hundred-page novel and have the reader turning pages and staying up late in the night to finish it over the course of a long weekend, and Bad Things definitely fits that mold. Thorne is one of the fantastic new voices in horror, and deserves to be heard by many more people than she has thus far. ****
skjam's review
3.0
When Ricky Piper was small, his twin brother Robin was taken by the greenjacks, amoral nature spirits that only certain people (such as Ricky) can see. Robin’s body still existed, but his mind became alien–and dangerous. Now it is decades later, and Rick Piper has his own children. Financial and family considerations make it a good idea to move back from Las Vegas to Santo Verde, the ancestral estate. Robin’s long dead, and maybe the greenjacks never existed. Surely the bad things are gone?
As widowed Rick moves back to California with his self-absorbed teen daughter Shelly and kindergartener Cody, it becomes obvious that he’s suppressed many of the memories of his traumatic childhood. His abusive aunt still lives in the family home, though she’s been separated into her own suite of rooms with her awful poodles (most of which have been stuffed.) The housekeeper and gardener live in a separate cottage, and avoid being in the main house at night. And no one’s looked in the secret passages for years, not since Rick’s parents were murdered by an unknown intruder.
Turns out the greenjacks are still real, even if only Rick and the family cat can see them. As Rick’s suppressed memories surface and assorted spooky things happen in the present day, readers will catch on to what’s really going on long before our protagonist. There’s a lot of seemingly obvious clues, but since Rick isn’t telling people large parts of the backstory, most other people don’t catch on either.
Quite a bit of the early flashbacks are more mildly gross than scary. Things pick up as Rick gets older.
Bonus diversity points for 1994 in that Rick’s sassy minority best friend is Dakota, a gay female impersonator. But it’s still a sassy minority best friend role. The love interest is heterosexual and cisgendered. Also an optometrist, which allows some semi-scientific talk about vision.
Robin was born without legs, which leads into some use of his “otherness” for spooky effect, but the author tries hard not to fall completely into ableism. (Not all the characters are as polite.) Content notes: child abuse, emotional abuse, rape, incest.
Despite the generic-sounding title (I expect a lot of people to find this review looking for other books and movies), this book has its own distinctive identity by the end and some genuinely funny bits.
Recommended for people who can deal with a bit of dated material in their horror.
As widowed Rick moves back to California with his self-absorbed teen daughter Shelly and kindergartener Cody, it becomes obvious that he’s suppressed many of the memories of his traumatic childhood. His abusive aunt still lives in the family home, though she’s been separated into her own suite of rooms with her awful poodles (most of which have been stuffed.) The housekeeper and gardener live in a separate cottage, and avoid being in the main house at night. And no one’s looked in the secret passages for years, not since Rick’s parents were murdered by an unknown intruder.
Turns out the greenjacks are still real, even if only Rick and the family cat can see them. As Rick’s suppressed memories surface and assorted spooky things happen in the present day, readers will catch on to what’s really going on long before our protagonist. There’s a lot of seemingly obvious clues, but since Rick isn’t telling people large parts of the backstory, most other people don’t catch on either.
Quite a bit of the early flashbacks are more mildly gross than scary. Things pick up as Rick gets older.
Bonus diversity points for 1994 in that Rick’s sassy minority best friend is Dakota, a gay female impersonator. But it’s still a sassy minority best friend role. The love interest is heterosexual and cisgendered. Also an optometrist, which allows some semi-scientific talk about vision.
Robin was born without legs, which leads into some use of his “otherness” for spooky effect, but the author tries hard not to fall completely into ableism. (Not all the characters are as polite.) Content notes: child abuse, emotional abuse, rape, incest.
Despite the generic-sounding title (I expect a lot of people to find this review looking for other books and movies), this book has its own distinctive identity by the end and some genuinely funny bits.
Recommended for people who can deal with a bit of dated material in their horror.
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