Prodigal

by Melanie Tem

Following her brother Ethan's brutal kidnapping and murder, twelve-year-old Lucy loses her hold on the real world and begins seeing apparitions of her dead brother, and is soon drawn to the evil force that took his life

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Vampires, Horror Thriller, Paranormal

384 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Melanie Kubachko was born and raised in rural northwestern Pennsylvania. She received a degree at Allegheny College and went on to earn a master's degree in social work from the University of Denver. Apart from a varied career in social work she has published short fiction in numerous publications, including Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Skin of the Soul, and Final Shadows. Her work has also been included in such anthologies as Women of Darkness and Women of the West.

Married to Steve Rasnic Tem.

Reviews

[Phil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Melanie Tem's first novel left me feeling rather unsettled to say the least. Prodigal takes a bit to get into, in part as the main protagonist is 12 yo Lucy with all the trials and tribulations of tween angst. Lucy is the third child of seven and this starts off with her oldest brother Ethan (17) paying her a visit in her bedroom; the problem is, Ethan has been missing for almost two years! Nonetheless, Lucy and her mother keep having visitations from Ethan. Dreams? Spectral occurrences? The police have given up trying to find Ethan, who ran away from juvie (he was, to put it mildly, a problem child), but Lucy's parents have never given up hope.

Ethan is dead.

One day, the social worker who works at the juvie Ethan was sent to calls the family and tells them Ethan just came to his house, but then dropped dead.

Ethan is dead.

This news rocks little Lucy's world. Lucy hates her parents, loves her parents. Hates her siblings, loves her siblings. Parents are supposed to keep kids safe, and Ethan is dead. The second oldest sibling, Rae, seems to be going 'the Ethan way', getting into trouble (shoplifting, etc.) and the family decides she needs counseling to nip this in the bud; unlike Ethan. Ethan is dead. They turn to the same counselor, a big man named Jerry, and she starts having sessions with him. One day, Rae disappears from the house. Is Rae dead like Ethan? Ethan is dead...

Besides having a twelve year old at the main character, the prose in Prodigal takes some getting used to. I tried to capture a bit of that here; Ethan is dead. About a third of the way through, however, Tem starts to really develop Lucy and her endless musings. Is Lucy next? Tragedy seems to be picking off the siblings in order after all. When school starts in the fall, Lucy has problems. School is stupid. The principal of the school decides to hold after school counseling sessions for several of the 'problem kids' at school, including Lucy. You guessed it, the counselor is Jerry. What could go wrong?

Tem's background as a social worker really shines through Prodigal and the dynamics of Lucy's family. Are Lucy's parents to blame for Ethan's death (Ethan is dead) and for Rae's going missing? You can see how a good family may get to be on the 'outs' to the system pretty quickly here, based on the words of a few 'experts'.

Really a haunting story, but one that takes some time to get into. The Abyss horror line by Dell, for all its shortcomings, did manage to put out some really good books by new authors, such as Kathe Koja, and Tem was another find to be sure. At times haunting, Prodigal was more unsettling than scary, but it really did a good job at that. Not sure how much I liked the denouement, but well worth a read if you can find it. 4 creepy stars!

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

what i love most about reading these old abyss horror paperbacks is, even when they’re bad they’re certainly interesting. luckily, prodigal is a good one: edgy, experimental, unsettling, not totally like anything i’ve read before . . . exactly what i look for in these abyss paperbacks.

i did struggle in the first few chapters, however: couldn’t quite gel with lucy’s character or her inner thoughts, and i felt her family (especially the parents) were rather flat, dull. but this is a book from the point of view of a twelve-year-old girl: the prose is fittingly unfussy and direct, like the very thoughts of an adolescent. lucy’s parents perhaps aren’t fully drawn because who really knows their parents that well at twelve? this book, like the age of twelve, is ambiguous, often shrouded in mystery—and a little frightening.

a slow burn and a puzzle and a successful rumination on loss and guilt, prodigal isn’t a book that offers up easy answers or immediately reveals itself, and i wouldn’t want it any other way. this joker is going to stick in my mind.

[Alex (The Bookubus) · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Don't you ever wonder? Don't you ever want to know what it's like to be dead?"

Eleven year old Lucy is one of seven children. The oldest, Ethan, started getting into trouble in his teenage years; staying out late, stealing, taking drugs. His parents sent him to a juvenile center and therapy. One day he went missing and they haven't seen him since. Part of the family believe he is dead while the others hold out hope that he is alive and will return home at any moment. Now the next oldest child, Rae, seems to be going down the same path and Lucy, the third child, worries if she will be next.

The whole story is told from Lucy's perspective and I thought it was excellently written and felt authentic for such a character. We experience a mix of her general everyday thoughts along with her conflicted feelings about her family, her worries for her future, along with her more strange musings and experiences. The story is somewhat slow-paced although I found it to be a very compelling read.

There are some unsettling scenes in this book amidst the day to day family drama and the story slowly develops into something dark and sinister. Personally I think this element is a spoiler so I don't want to go into detail but it is also a theme that not everyone will want to read so if you want to know you can click on the part marked spoiler: child abuse and paedophilia.

I thought this was a really unique read in both its story and its storytelling. It is ambiguous but that really worked for me and I didn't feel I had questions even though there were things left unanswered; I felt the ambiguity worked really well for the characters and the story overall. I know the child narrator and the ambiguity won't be everyone's cup of tea but if any of this piques your interest then I definitely recommend checking it out.

[Coral · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m always amazed when a book manages to make me feel worried about the characters. I felt real peril here! Prodigal is heavy with grief, full of teenage angst and the feeling that no one can protect you — not even your parents. This book far exceeded my expectations going into it.

[Bandit · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are not that many really good female horror writers. Melanie Tem is one of them. I've read four books by her and she's consistently excellent.

[Briar Page · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me about half the novel to really get into this one. I liked it, but to that point I couldn't help but compare it a little unfavorably with Tem's WILDING in my head. While the latter is fast-paced and many-voiced, with a story that can feel almost epic in scope (the rise and fall of a werewolf dynasty), PRODIGAL is an insular slow-burn told exclusively from the close third-person perspective of a naive eleven year old girl.

Then, as the pieces of the plot and the nature of the book's antagonist/threat really started falling into place, I was hooked: the amount of time spent in Lucy's mind, observing her family's life through her eyes, had made me attached to them, made me empathize with them. The childlike narrative voice worked to put me back in the mindset of a pre-teen on the cusp of adolescence, a mental space where many things that seem obvious to an adult are obfuscated and confusing, emotions are more potent and dangerous because they're much more difficult to understand and describe, and adults like teachers and therapists have so much power over you that even if they *aren't* supernaturally malevolent and controlling entities...well, it can feel like they might as well be. Tem excels at writing realistic, non-precocious and non-sentimentalized children and teenagers; Lucy's thought processes rang very true to me.

The depiction of her parents was also nice; I think in this kind of story it would have been easy for Tem to make them abusive or neglectful, or else to make them entirely blameless and faultlessly devoted to their children at all times. Instead, they are loving and well-meaning but imperfect and stressed; they're sometimes distracted or laid low by grief and depression right when their kids need them the most; they sometimes trust the wrong people with their kids' well-being and snap at their kids in frightening ways when frustrated/upset. In short, they're pretty normal parents, probably parents a lot of us can recognize from our own childhoods.

I've been dancing around the actual main plot/horror premise of this novel, and that's because frankly I think it's probably most potent if you go into the book blind, not knowing what to expect. It's not something I've ever seen depicted in quite this way before, and as with all the best horror it works exquisitely both if read at face value and if taken as an allegory for real world forms of abuse, predation, and trauma.

[Dolceluna ♡ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ethan, un ragazzo tossicodipendente, scompare misteriosamente. Tutti sono convinti che la sua sia solo una fuga passeggera, tutti tranne Lucy, la sorella minore, la quale lo vede apparire e scomparire negli angoli della casa e nei prati circostanti sotto forma di presenza misteriosa, evanescente come un sogno, inquietante come uno degli incubi peggiori….e si convince dunque che Ethan sia morto. E’ così, difatti, e il suo cadavere non tarderà ad essere scoperto. Una tragedia famigliare, un incubo reale. Poco dopo, anche Rae, problematica sorella di Lucy ed Ethan, svanisce nel nulla e la storia sembra ripetersi. E i genitori, che oltre a Ethan, Rae e Lucy hanno anche altri 4 figli cui badare, da svaniti sembrano perdersi del tutto. Insomma, un romanzo come tanti, a tratti piacevole, a tratti mellifluo, che si è curiosi di leggere fino in fondo per capire dove l’autrice vuole arrivare. L’unica nota che in tutto questo stona è la dicitura, sulla copertina di “Vincitore dell’Horror Writers of America come migliore opera prima”. Horror?! Il romanzo non ha nulla di horror, comprese le (iniziali) apparizioni di Ethan a Lucy, ma che in tal senso di spaventoso, di raccapricciante, di pauroso, non hanno nulla. Più che horror definirei “Lucy” un romanzo sui rapporti malati e deviati fra ragazzi e adulti, con risvolti finali che scivolano sul thriller, dato che la scomparsa dei personaggi sarà opera di un brutto orco reale, una faccia insospettabile della vita di tutti i giorni. Ma si ha la sensazione che la storia resti sospesa in un limbo fumoso, dove i contorni delle vicenda, seppur alla fine comprensibili, non sono mai propriamente definiti…per questo non sono riuscita a sentire su di me grande trasporto e coinvolgimento man mano che giravo le pagine, anche se lo stile non ostico e la curiosità mi hanno portato comunque alla fine senza difficoltà.
A suo modo godibile. Ma l’horror è un’altra cosa.

[Nick Spacek · Rating 1 out of 5]

for a novel to be interesting, your protagonist needs to be compelling. lucy is not compelling. she's irritating, mildly hateful, and a young girl who it took a solid 140 pages to understand exactly why the hell we, the reader, should give a damn about her.

then there's some weird spirits -- projections? -- and a whole lot of really creepy stuff before an ending which answers about half the questions raised by the rest of the novel. for real: i have no idea how or why most of the action in the novel took place, and i just about chucked prodigal across the goddamn room.

i'm all for endings which leave you wondering, but when you're absolutely clueless about the majority of a novel, then your ending is kind of a cop-out and you know what, fuck this book.

[Snakes · Rating 1 out of 5]

Another Paperback from Hell read only I cannot recall if the book was discussed or if it was simply that the cover was displayed. The book is written from the perspective of a kid who has several siblings who have died or disappeared. 95% of the book is passive occurrences and the kid’s analysis of the events taking place. The entire reveal of the plot occurs in the last 20 pages and everything before that was uninteresting and only “horrifying” from a distance that never achieves suspension of disbelief. I didn’t think it was very good, not in the slightest.

[The Local Spooky Hermit · Rating 1 out of 5]

If this is the book I think it is then I hate this damn book. It was at least 2 years ago I read it and I've been trying to find the book to add it to my read list and to review it. It seems like the whole book is told in some weird dream state, at one point the brother is laying by the mother and then some how he just crawls right back into the hole he came out of her.. yep... THAT HOLE!!!
the end is vague like was he molesting the kids? was he sucking the lives out of them? Is the guy fat or thin? WHAT DOES HE LOOK LIKE WHY IS EVERYTHING DESCRIBED WEIRDLY AND VAGUE WHAT IS HAPPENING!?!?!?! his death is weird was he turning brittle and paper like...? I think.. IDK ITS DAMN WEIRD AND I HATED IT FOR BEING VAGUE ON WHAT IS HAPPENING!!! I WAS CONFUSED MOST OF THE BOOK!! I don't even know what happened to the book, if I threw it out or what. it was in my hand one second and gone the next, I almost always know what i do with books when I'm done if they are bad i throw them across the room this time I guess I treated it like a hot potato and it magicked away as i finished the last word. *POOF!*

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

An atmospheric, bleak and moving psychological horror novel. The bland and stifling suburban setting is rendered deeply sinister through its prism of dysfunctional families, creepy social workers, self-destructive teens, desperate addicts and psychic vampires. The strong characters and lavish attention to detail and setting make this a highly original, accomplished and unusual genre entry.

[Susanna Neri · Rating 4 out of 5]

3 e 1/2 visto dal punto di vista di Lucy, ragazza quasi adolescente che si trova ad affrontare il trauma della scomparsa prima di suo fratello e poi anche di sua sorella, ma sono scomparsi o morti, quelli che vede sono fantasmi o allucinazioni, sta precipitando in un vortice di follia o davvero sta accadendo qualcosa di diverso e terribile? Anche se ad un certo punto era evidente dove si andava a parare, ho apprezzato il viaggio nella mente di una ragazza alle prese con paura, ribellione, rabbia.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two names seem to still have some clout from the Dell/Abyss line: Kathe Koja is one; Melanie Tem is the other. Both are known as authors who write unusual books that are more about unsettling than scaring, and are (so far, at least) closer to the "cutting edge" that the publisher claimed these books would be. Prodigal was Tem's first novel, and it shows what to expect with her career.

The story is about a family of nine who, as the story opens, is still recovering from their oldest son, who has run away. Told from the point of view of Lucy, the third-oldest child who is eleven years old, we get a somewhat skewed look at the state of the family. We see the grief and the denial of the parents, the anger and confusion of the children, and the interference of the family's therapist, but through the eyes of a character who doesn't have the maturity to understand much of what she sees. She's still in the "I hate you!" stage of her emotional development, and as her family slowly crumbles around her, we see a pattern emerge among the oldest children and how they relate to their parents and their therapist.

Prodigal is not out-and-out horror. It contains disturbing imagery and characters, but Tem gives us hints at things being not right, as opposed to giving us the shock of the monsters fully revealed. Events are ordinary, but hardly mundane, and when Tem does show us events that aren't normal, or even natural, they stand out even more against the backdrop of the family. Her horrors stand in as representations of the Brill family dynamic, but since they're told to us from Lucy's perspective, we know that they're actually happening, since she's not old enough to understand allegory or metaphor.

This book is another re-read for me, but I didn't remember any details of the story as I read it. This doesn't surprise me; when I read this book for the first time, I was looking for out-and-out horror, and I'm sure it disappointed me. Like Lucy, then I didn't have the maturity and experience to recognize the book for being as effective as it is, but now, I can recognize it as the achievement it is. Prodigal, almost thirty years after its first publication, is still relevant.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was unique because it's a book for adults for it entirely from the point of view of a child, an 11-year-old whose brother has disappeared. Even though he is gone, she and her mother have seen him many times, but in a supernatural way – he disappears and reappears in their home. Is he haunting them from beyond the grave?

Meanwhile, the social worker who counseled the young man seems to have an agenda of his own, he circulates on the outer reaches of the family, interfering in the lives of their children. When another child goes missing, the main character's older sister, things get even worse.

One of the issues with this book is that you see the trouble coming from a long way away, you know what's going on, you know who the villain is, and you see the young girl putting herself in danger again and again. You want to scream at the parents and shake them, and tell them what is right in front of their face – that the social workers preying on their children. At times Lucy seemed really bratty, but I think she reacted the way most children would under the circumstances. I did get frustrated with her and with her parents, but that just shows that the author did an effective job of making me care about the characters.

I like that this book had a lot of suspense and it, it really draws you in and makes you want to know how it's all going to be resolved. One problem with it is that it never quite explains how some of the supernatural things happen. We understand that Jerry is some kind of "emotional vampire" who drains young people of their emotions and ultimately sucks them dry, but we never learn how Rae and Ethan managed to appear to their parents while they are being held prisoner in Jerry's basement. That is a huge supernatural thing that is never explained.

[Ines · Rating 2 out of 5]

La faccio breve, libro veramente scorretto, utilizzare nascondendo l'argomento Horror per approdare nella pedofilia, il finale è indecente...
la scrittura poi è alquanto di piu' irritante, un continuo salto da prima alla terza persona, storia piena zeppa di descrizioni zavorre che nulla donano al continuum narrativo...
per dirla in due parole povere: du balle cosmiche!!!

[Albert · Rating 2 out of 5]

Antagonist was sort of interesting. Overall, very boring and forgettable book, found myself skipping pages quite a lot, gets a bit more interesting around Chapter 24. Thankfully it was short.

[Konstantine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dell Abyss 5/43

for future reference, im not reading the Dell Abyss titles in order from here on out, it’ll just be in terms of accessibility and interest in the book, I may get through them all maybe not.

that aside, i’d say this is probably the second strongest of the line thus far, Cipher still being number one. main problem is it takes a lot of patience for it to actually feel that way. our main point of view being a twelve year old can make the narrative pretty plodding at times, it took me a while to actually commit to the book and keep pushing. will flat out say the pov will really affect your enjoyment from the get go but i was willing to forgive it.

id say overall im pleased with what i got, the therapist being a weird cosmic entity as an allegory for what i assume is molestation is strange but works in conjunction to all the fucked sequences and scenes that build up. i will say i enjoy the vagueness of what the villain is really supposed to be, made the book vastly more entertaining. once the book actually gets rolling its pretty good, just kinda dry at parts due to the choice of narrator

[D.A. Cairns · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thrilling and disturbing

I'm amazed how often I read books with teenage, or in this case almost teen, protagonists. Most of Prodigal reads like a coming of age drama. It has ghostly insertions here and there and there's some chilling and ominously foreboding scenes, but not enough to be described as horror.

Prodigal is about a family which falls victim to a supernatural being with paedophilistic tendencies. That's the real horror. The narrative however is primarily focused on Lucy and her inner world as she reaches puberty, as well as her family dynamics.

The climax is absolutely riveting. I couldn't stop reading until the end. It was a five star climax of true horror.

However, it left me with questions about how the climax could have happened. It was good enough for me to suspend my disbelief...almost.

Overall, I loved Prodigal and was surprised by its power and darkness. I think Tem an excellent job of creating tension, setting scenes and eliciting emotional responses.

[Justin Decloux · Rating 3 out of 5]

A vivid illustration of the effect of loss on a teenage girl. Melanie Tem is a master at the creating mood, through repetition and asides, but she wheezes through the last 150 pages of this story once the threat becomes clear and lame. Would have worked great as a novella.

[Bill Borre]

I am sorry to leave a comment here under reviews for a book that I have not read yet but I wanted to assign a date for this book and the date set functionality of the website currently seems to be broken. If they get this working I will use this and delete this review.

02-27-2009

[We All · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un po' Shirley Jackson che scrive con punte di morbosità alla Clive Barker. Forse i paragoni sono un po' elevati ma è un libro che merita di essere riscoperto, anche per il tema che è come i figli debbano affrontare delle sfide personali dal quale i genitori non possono proteggerli, sempre attuale.

[Dana Stewart · Rating 3 out of 5]

Slow burn. It was tough to get through the first half. The second half picks up and the ending was fun horror. Just don’t know if I’d give it a full endorsement.

[Laura]

I’m calling it on this book. I can’t handle the on purpose immature writing through the viewpoint of an 11-year-old and then somehow she’s thinking about her brother‘s dick?

[Gingaeru · Rating 4 out of 5]

"She didn't see anybody in any of the houses; maybe nobody lived there. Maybe they were all dead. Maybe houses were for something else altogether, and the idea of people living in them was just a trick to make you miss what was really going on."
-
"In the movies and on the soaps when the cute guys did that and pretty music came up, you knew they were going to kiss somebody and then make love. Lucy'd often wished there'd be music in real life to warn you when somebody was going to kiss you or when the murderer was nearby."

I enjoyed this. It is a little ambiguous, so I can understand how readers might be upset about the lack of explanation for certain things. But some people take it too far. (Throwing a book away simply because you failed to understand it is unacceptable behavior; now there's one less copy in the world due to your thoughtless action.) I found the conclusion satisfactory and the novel, as a whole, to be well-written, engrossing, and balanced. It feels like a proper look into the head of an 11/12-year-old girl in the late 1980s/early 1990s (which incidentally contributes a bit to the ambiguity).

It isn't truly a spoiler to say that the visions of Ethan and Rae that Lucy and her parents experience throughout the book are left unexplained. In fact, it's better to be aware of it going in since it seems to be the main issue with unsatisfied readers. I interpreted the visions of Ethan and Rae to be a sort of astral projection (a side effect of having interacted with a certain character in a certain way); their only means of conveying a desperate warning/cry for help.

I appreciated how some of the little things casually mentioned repeatedly (balloons, infrastructures, Lucy's atypical fascination with anatomy, etc.) ended up being somewhat relevant. It's subtle, so it's potentially missable, but it adds a certain something.
...

I don't have too many complaints, but some relatively minor things bothered me, nevertheless. What kind of average American family eats dinner at 3:00 in the afternoon?! Lucy's mother is pretty weird (and negligent at times). I understand that she's going through a difficult time, but still.

I will say, the scene where Ethan is in bed with his mother (after his confirmed death!), in which he proceeds to shrink and reenter his mother's womb, doesn't work for me (especially since Carole acts as though nothing happened). Is Lucy just hallucinating, or what?

Climactic plot holes:
Carole was supposedly copulating with her husband at the time Lucy left the house. How could she possibly have gotten in her car and tailed the van carrying her daughter away so quickly? And I don't see how she could've caught up with them again after they shook her off (unless Rae guided her). Someone also managed to find the time to bring in the authorities (Carole obviously didn't have a cell phone). I suppose the police could have simply seen the chase in progress and pursued, but there was a delay between her arrival at the scene and theirs. Plus, Tony was with the police, so that doesn't track. And if Tony phoned the police from home after his wife drove off, there's no way they knew where to look. I don't know, that part could have been written a lot neater. As it is, it makes no sense.
...

Typo:
"She always timed it so she left the house either before or after all her brothers and sisters, so she'd wouldn't be seen walking anywhere near them..."
...

377 pages, not 384.

8/10

[Debra]

Stephen King endorsed the entire Dell Abyss Horror line. Here is his blurb:

"Thank you for introducing me to the remarkable line of novels currently being issued under Dell's Abyss imprint. I have given a great many blurbs over the last twelve years or so, but this one marks two firsts: first unsolicited blurb (I called you) and the first time I have blurbed a whole line of books. In terms of quality, production, and plain old story-telling reliability (that's the bottom line, isn't it), Dell's new line is amazingly satisfying...a rare and wonderful bargain for readers. I hope to be looking into the Abyss for a long time to come."

[Cristiana Serra · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked it.

If you like horror, you go and read Prodigal. There were even parts that I had to stop reading during the night, because it was freaking me out!

[Gef · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review coming soon.

[Nikki · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not a fan of kids, so having a pre-teen narrarator didn't help. Everything felt pretty obvious. Can't believe it won awards.

[Mandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

SPOILER ALERT***"*
Good story but I would have liked more of an explanation of what the thing that was Jerry actually was and where it came from.

[Laronza Wiley-moore · Rating 4 out of 5]

predictable but I liked it.