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Nursery Rhymes 4 Dead Children (Division #4)

by Lee Thompson (Goodreads Author)

4.28 of 5 stars 4.28 · rating details · 25 ratings · 10 reviews

In this creepy Division Mythos novel phantoms from the past mingle with those of the present, all swirling in a dark maelstrom over Division. Haunted by the part he played in his brother Mark’s death, John McDonnell takes a midnight hike and stumbles across four dead girls upon the forest floor. Their severed limbs spell Repent. The coroner finds Mark’s onyx skeleton key i...more

Hardcover, 1st Limited Edition, 334 pages

Published May 17th 2011 by Delirium Books

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Mar 20, 2012 Chris rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: horror, 2012-reads, 2012-favorites

Nursery Rhymes 4 dead children is a great mystery story and a great fantasy/horror story but it is much more than those things. It is the type of book that I think of when I use the term "literary horror."

Two old friends are brought together in a perfect storm of tragedy that may have been caused by or perhaps may in turn be feeding a demonic intrusion into the town of Division. Magic, both dark and good, runs deep in this town and through generations of its inhabitants. We are witnessing the r...more

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Jul 21, 2011 K.E. rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

Lee Thompson’s debut novel, Nursery Rhymes 4 Dead Children, is about redemption and whether it is possible to live with our crimes. It is a damning argument that the past and our sins cannot be forgotten, that they shape us and someday come to call. Pain-warped memories lead Thompson’s characters onward into the dark. Petty transgressions of the everyday are showcased beside deeper evils buried behind frozen lips. When the dead speak, who do they accuse? Who do they redeem?

From the get-go, Thomp...more Lee Thompson’s debut novel, Nursery Rhymes 4 Dead Children, is about redemption and whether it is possible to live with our crimes. It is a damning argument that the past and our sins cannot be forgotten, that they shape us and someday come to call. Pain-warped memories lead Thompson’s characters onward into the dark. Petty transgressions of the everyday are showcased beside deeper evils buried behind frozen lips. When the dead speak, who do they accuse? Who do they redeem?

From the get-go, Thompson plunges the reader into a world where the very fabric of reality is suspect. Written around John McDonnell, the new deputy of Division, Pennsylvania, the story opens the eve of John’s first day on the job, as he struggles to contend with the death of his brother and the millstone of his own guilt. The reader immediately has cause to question his stability. John is seeing things. He carves “the words of the dead” into his chest.

Division is filled with secrets. Its leaders hide their true selves behind wholesome facades. The results of their sins simmer under the surface, waiting for the right people to exploit them. Or the right demons.

Bring four teenage girls, murdered and mutilated, into it and matters get worse for John. Add a cover-up and the will of ghosts and demons, and things manage to degrade even further.

The characters of Nursery Rhymes 4 Dead Children are multilayered and rarely what they seem. From the beginning, every action, every word, is questionable. John is angry, confused and hurt--about his family, his lover and his life. He seeks forgiveness, but has little hope of finding it. He doesn’t know who to trust and his friends, as well as his enemies, guard their own secrets.

Thompson’s style is intoxicating, bending reality with a subtle touch. Unsure what was real and what was specter, I questioned the sanity of nearly all the characters, but never lost my grip on the plot. He conjures hallucinatory apparitions to decorate his characters’ experience, and takes grim walks through dreamscape. In rare moments of humor, I found myself smiling, only to feel my lips twist into a grimace as the next ghoul slipped into my vision, another insidious reminder that little stands alone in Thompson’s universe.

Every time I search for a word to describe Nursery Rhymes 4 Dead Children, ‘intense’ rises to the surface. I spent most of the book with a taut neck, waiting for the next blow to fall. The prose holds on, dragging the reader through the gruesome sideshow of horrors residing in the depths of Division. The plot works on a personal level, playing on childhood traumas and individual crosses, and on a larger scale, dealing with the balance of Heaven and Hell. Fusing supernatural horror with crime fiction, Thompson leads us into the murky shadows of this world with the deft hand of a more experienced writer. Despite being one of the more disturbing books I’ve come across, the plot and prose never felt heavy or gratuitous. A remarkable feat in the genre.

Nursery Rhymes 4 Dead Children will go on my reread list and I look forward to more of Thompson’s titles.(less)

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Sep 20, 2011 Shaun Ryan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Lee Thompson's debut novel does something I look for in a novel; it makes you think even as it entertains. A story about small towns and buried secrets, NR4DC digs beneath the surface of these common themes as well as the world we live in and how we choose to perceive it. Thompson has a knack for taking the common and well worn theme of good vs. evil and turning it inside out, standing it on it's head, and making it personal. His talent for blurring lines we like to think are well defined makes...more

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Jun 04, 2011 Benjamin Uminsky rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: horror

Hmm,

This was an interesting debut for Lee Thompson. I have never read Thompson before, so this was a debut for me as well. I think I liked many parts of the book, despite some serious flaws that I really felt detracted from the overall enjoyabillity of this novel.

Overall, I think there was just about enough positives to outweigh the negatives on this debut... ultimately meriting both three stars and my attention at perhaps another Thompson offering in the future.

Positives:
The mood was phenomenal...more Hmm,

This was an interesting debut for Lee Thompson. I have never read Thompson before, so this was a debut for me as well. I think I liked many parts of the book, despite some serious flaws that I really felt detracted from the overall enjoyabillity of this novel.

Overall, I think there was just about enough positives to outweigh the negatives on this debut... ultimately meriting both three stars and my attention at perhaps another Thompson offering in the future.

Positives:
The mood was phenomenal in this novel.. reminded me a lot of Giffune's most recent novella, DREAMS THE RAGMAN. Likewise, character development was well above average and combined with great dialogue, all of the characters felt real and accessible. The only character I really disliked was Cat... talk about a wet blanket. In fact, I think the best way to describe the dialogue is organic. Nothing felt hackneyed, trite, or even forced... you really got a sense of how these characters are living their lives and trying to make their way in the world. Major props to Thompson on this account. I was definitely drawn in by the characters, accented nicely with a fairly oppressive mood that switched on and off between menacing and frantic to a dream/nightmare-like haze.

Negatives:
Here is where the book felt pretty inaccessible to the reader... there was WAY too much going on. This novel felt like there were two completely unrelated stories that so happened to have the main characters participating in both plot lines. In fact, as we drew down to the conclusion, I was left struggling with how Thompson was going to provide any kind of explanation as to the relevance of the first storyline, which was the mystery of the butchered dead girls found in the forest. While this mystery could have served as a fine foundation to this novel, as it turns out, it had very little relevance to the real plot line, which ended up being a rather interesting battle of the supernatural. I'm still a little bewildered as to why the author spent about 200+ pages on the first plot line. Oh well, I'll chalk the first 200 pages up to mood building.

One other distraction was the shifting of the main character's POV (John) from first person POV to thrid person POV. I'm not sure if this was poor writing or if this is a new approach to story telling, but it was really disorienting when the shifting POV occured... and it occured on multiple occasions. The other kind of shifting in narative was from the real world narative to the hazy dream narative, which was fine. It felt like you were piercing the veil into a hidden reality; however, I would recommend the author perhaps do a little more in preparing the reader for those shifts... they were fairly abrupt and ultimately forced me to re-read a couple passages to make sure I understood which reality the narative travelled into and at what point the shift occured. I found a similar effect used in DREAM's THE RAGMAN and also Sandy Deluca's MANHATTAN GRIMOIRE... but those shifts were much more nuanced and the transitions were a bit smoother.

Overall, decent enough first attempt, but really needs some re-tooling to be a much more literary success. (less)

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Jan 09, 2012 Dave rated it 5 of 5 stars

You think you know what you're getting into with a title like "Nursery Rhymes 4 Dead Children": a world where nothing and no one is safe, everyone is suspect, and the violence is horrific. And let's face it, this book is all of those things, but so much, much more.

The little Pennsylvania town of Division (which is almost a character in and of itself) is the scene of a brutal ritualistic murder involving 4 teenage girls. John McDonnell, a newbie sheriff's deputy, discovers the gruesome site while...more

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Oct 27, 2011 Glen Krisch rated it 5 of 5 stars

Just finished Nursery Rhymes 4 Dead Children. Thompson's prose is stunning, the layered plot traveling so many twists and turns. Highly recommended to those readers who like intricate, sophisticated horror.

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Apr 26, 2012 Robert Dunbar rated it 5 of 5 stars

If you crave shallow genre fare, you’d be well advised to look elsewhere. But if you’ve a taste for something with a bit more substance …

Lee Thompson’s debut novel is a thoughtful and thought-provoking tale of the supernatural. From the first page onward, murders and mutilations and evil secrets abound in a small Pennsylvania town, all of which the reader experiences through the eyes of a young deputy (who is himself no stranger to guilt). The voice of the deputy feels authentic: brooding, soulf...more

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Jan 16, 2012 Ron rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: horror

Very good dark fantasy. There's enough going on to maintain interest and a good amount of suspense. Hard to follow in some places and suspension of disbelief gets strained a couple of times but no book is perfect. I would recommend it to any fan of supernatural horror.

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Jan 22, 2012 Helen rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, horror-fiction

Sometimes, it's hard to find the right words for an adequate review, so I'm going to let Bill Bailey do it for me instead:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJdq-U...

And that's the best I can do!
Other than that; very eerie and atmospheric, but I did get lost at times, though admittedly this was probably because I was reading other books at the same time, and this is the sort of book that deserves one's undivided attention.

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Mar 27, 2011 Sheri White rated it 4 of 5 stars

Good book; review to come at Xomba for Delirium Books.

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Jul 15, 2011 Scott Tyson rated it 4 of 5 stars

A deep, emotional, extremely moving book. If I didn't know better, I would've thought Lee had been writing for a very long time.

Highly recommended novel from this up-and-comer to watch.

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Apr 23, 2013 Maxine Marsh marked it as to-read

Shelves: horror, darkfuse

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Mar 24, 2013 Kimberly marked it as to-read · review of another edition

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Feb 01, 2013 Jason rated it 4 of 5 stars

Jan 27, 2013 Tim rated it 5 of 5 stars

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Jan 02, 2013 Bob Meracle rated it 5 of 5 stars

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About Lee Thompson

I write dark fiction. I want to make people feel and make them think. That's my dream. I will also be writing under the names Thomas Morgan, James Logan, and Julian Vaughn. Some of my favorite authors: Clive Barker, Donald Westlake, Peter Straub, Stephen King, Greg Gifune, Lee Thomas, William Faulkner, Robert Dunbar, John Gardner, Michael Connelly, Dennis Lehane, John Connolly, Jack Cady, Tom Picc...more I write dark fiction. I want to make people feel and make them think. That's my dream. I will also be writing under the names Thomas Morgan, James Logan, and Julian Vaughn. Some of my favorite authors: Clive Barker, Donald Westlake, Peter Straub, Stephen King, Greg Gifune, Lee Thomas, William Faulkner, Robert Dunbar, John Gardner, Michael Connelly, Dennis Lehane, John Connolly, Jack Cady, Tom Piccirilli, Brian Hodge, Douglas Clegg, Jack Ketchum, Lee Child, James Lee Burke, and Cormac McCarthy.

"10 out of 10 Stars... GOSSAMER: A TALE OF LOVE AND TRAGEDY will blow you away my friends. It is that good." -- Peter Schwotzer/Famous Monsters of Filmland.

"WHEN WE JOIN JESUS IN HELL is as crazy as its tormented protagonist. Hard as nails.” – Jack Ketchum

“Lee Thompson knows his horror-noir. He fuses both genres together in the turmoil of terror, tragedy, blood, guilt, and lost chances at redemption.”–Tom Piccirilli, author of THE LAST KIND WORDS

"The voice of the deputy feels authentic: brooding, soulful, haunted. In fact, there’s a heartfelt quality to the whole grim book. Even some of the most grisly moments manage to be poetic and full of emotion, and the author’s literary influences echo loudly. At times, the mood evokes Piccirilli or Braunbeck or Gifune combined with Sherwood Anderson."-- Robert Dunbar, author of WILLY, THE PINES, and THE SHORE

“Thompson’s voice is his own — strong, hypnotic, and unsettling. Nursery Rhymes 4 Dead Children is a bleak fucking book, and therein lies its danger. So beautifully-constructed is Thompson’s prose, that the reader is often caught off-guard, mesmerized by a turn of phrase or a descriptive passage, until the book grabs you by the balls and rips them right off, breaking your heart and your psyche in the process.” — Brian Keene, author of GHOUL, DARK HOLLOW and THE RISING.

"I’ve said it many times and believe it more everyday, Lee Thompson is not only the next big name at Delirium Books but in the genre." – Shane Ryan Staley at Darkfuse Publications.

"The Dampness of Mourning is a riveting Thriller..." Midwest Book Review.

"Lee Thompson’s prose is electric!" — Bob Freeman, author of DESCENDANT.

"Like a dark Twilight Zone meets Alfred Hitchcock Mystery." -- Lee Thompson, author of NURSERY RHYMES 4 DEAD CHILDREN.

http://leethompsonfiction.com
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Nursery Rhymes 4 Dead Children (Division #4)

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