Malevolent Nevers by Tom Rimer

Malevolent Nevers by Tom Rimer

I have to start this review with a confession. I misunderstood the opening sentences of the blurb and it led me to expect a very different kind of book that the one Mr. Rimer wrote. The lines are: “Abel Ward just wants to reconnect with his son. After being a ghost for seventeen years, he’s returned and trying to be a parent again.” I don’t know about you, but when I see a horror novel talking about ghosts, I expect to see ghosts. And what a cool premise—ghost dad trying to connect with his boy. Alas, that’s not the kind of ghost Rimer intended us to think about, but the mix up messed up the first fifteen or twenty chapters of the book for me as I started thinking, maybe I misread and Abel is going to become a ghost.

 

Anyway, mix up or not, the novel starts a bit slow, Abel is a mess trying to straighten himself out. His son is an annoying teenager with sometimes difficult to follow speech patterns and who somehow has a cool girlfriend who is left behind when Abel learns that his 105 year old great aunt is dying and he is apparently guilted in to coming to visit her with his boy.

 

It takes a few more chapters, but things finally start to click. It’s a spooky old house on marshy land. The aunt is insane. The neighbors and people of the town all know something bad about the aunt (and apparently Abel) and clearly fear something terrible is about to happen, but they aren’t talking about it. Abel’s also being manipulated by his first crush who is now a housekeeper for his dying aunt.

 

So things are bad and the reader, the aunt, and the neighbors clearly think something supernatural is going to go down, but Abel, realistically I would judge, isn’t willing to even think about such a possibility. And when his aunt insists she not be buried in the family plot but be left out to be gathered up (by what she doesn’t say), Abel won’t even try to comprehend what she’s talking about. And he certainly isn’t ready to believe that none of his ancestors are in the family plot either.

 

Then the aunt dies and things get progressively worse until Abel and his son (and the girlfriend who took the bus to join them) have to fight for their lives to survive the problem at the aunt’s home.

 

As horror story plots go, this one is pretty good, but I do have some major frustrations with it. First off, while I can understand Abel getting all worked up and driving a thousand miles to be with his aunt when she died (she raised him and he ran away from home thirty years earlier and feels guilty) I just can’t understand why he stayed on afterward. The excuse it to get the home ready to sell, but frankly, it’s not clear anyone would ever buy it, and certainly two weeks of work around the house wasn’t going to add any value. And his son is desperate to go back home. It just made no sense and it makes less sense every single day as things get worse and worse.

 

I also don’t understand why no one would just sit Abel down and explain why they thought his house was cursed and that the whole town would die if he didn’t do exactly what they told him to do. He might still have said no, but they keep telling him he knows what he has to do, and he keeps saying he has no idea what they’re talking about, and they are afraid of dying but won’t tell him what’s going on. That made no sense.

 

My last big problem with the book is that we never find out how Abel’s family became keepers of this curse of the Malevolent Nevers. We learn just enough to survive the current problem, but not enough to understand why they got into this arrangement in the first place. Despite the big house, they aren’t wealthy. They aren’t powerful or influential. In a classic deal with the devil, you expect people to get something out of the deal but I don’t see what they got. The only thing I can imagine is that they made the deal to protect their neighbors, but if that’s the case I would have liked Rimer to tell us.

 

I don’t want to end the review on a negative note. Once the mystery of the aunt started to unfold, the story became quite gripping and I read the last three-quarters in one sitting. Rimer can really build suspense and I’m glad I read the book.