Jere Cunningham: Master of Description

The first I heard of Jere Cunningham was in the early 1980s, when I found out about a novel called The Abyss, which had a Stephen King recommendation. While the novel looked tempting, strangely, I never read it until decades later when I got serious about my writing. I loved the book so much I bought the other three horror novels he’d written that are advertised on Amazon.com. I found them to be some of the best books I’d ever read in my life, but I couldn’t locate any information about him on the Internet, except for some brief mentions of his screenwriting successes. A great author, a greater mystery.

 

Some will describe The Abyss as a book about people mining too deeply and digging into Hell, but when I finally read it, the story had more to it than that, in my opinion. But before his most publicized horror novel, he’d written a couple of Fawcett gold-medal books in the ’70s called Hunter’s Blood and The Legacy. I don’t want to give too much away, but in the former, a group of men go hunting, but things go terribly awry. This struck me as not only brilliant, but also original, as I’d never read a tale like that. In The Legacy,  a creepy old house and a dark evil causes problems for a family, threatening the dynamic and also their lives.

 

Just before The Abyss, he released a book called The Visitor. While this is the weakest of the four, that is by no means a criticism. You have to stay with this one, as the first half may have you wondering where he’s going with the story. But the second half explodes as he unleashed a threat so fierce, a family can barely defend themselves against it. The tale is insidious as usual; he again wows with the best descriptive prowess I’ve ever seen. There’s another book by him advertised on Amazon that’s a dark fantasy, but that’s not my genre of interest. Though I haven’t read it, it’s probably better than most horror novels, and I may break down and buy it in the future, just so I can read another book by the master.

 

Check out his work. You won’t be disappointed.