Night things

by Thomas F. Monteleone

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

Genres: Horror

316 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

Reviews

[Jack Tripper · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've always been a sucker for the "small, middle-of-nowhere town under attack by ancient evil" trope in horror (bonus points if the town's snowed in or cut off in some way), but this was a pretty typical example, with not much here to separate it from the pack.

The basic story is that there's a construction project going on in a small community in New Mexico, and an old Native American burial ground is accidentally uncovered. Soon mysterious, brutally violent deaths are occurring everywhere, with strange, bird-like claw prints being left behind near the crime scenes. Tony Cavella, the new head of the small newspaper in town, just knows there's a connection between the burial ground and the butchery taking place.

Decent setup, if a bit cliche. The main problem is that the novel jumps around from POV to POV every 5-6 pages, leaving the reader no time to truly get invested in their lives, which is key for me in a horror novel. Many of the characters are given detailed backstories only so that they can be immediately killed. I wished the story had stuck more with just a few main characters -- mainly Cavella and his pre-teen daughter Dierdre, shopkeeper Lori, Sheriff Lopez, and the Native American old-timer Charles Longhand. The rest were uninteresting, ancillary "redshirts," imo, only there to create the illusion of danger.

Still, it was a decent time-waster that had a few chilling moments, though far too many pages were devoted to depicting everyday, normal boring life for me. This is fine when you have intriguing, fully-realized characters, but that wasn't the case here, and as a result there were no real stakes. The pace was very slow and deliberate, which did make the moments of horror all the more startling, after being lulled into a false sense of security for such long lengths of time.

Monteleone has done better work elsewhere, though, namely his short fiction and his followup novel, Night Train, as well as his editorial work on the seminal anthology series, Borderlands.

2.5 Stars

[David Veith · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.55 I would say. A fun read. Good pace to it. For most of it, just the right amount of back story. Story flowed rather well. Could have used a bit more action for my taste though. Also, would have liked the ending to be a little more dramatic.

Spoilers below

Love stories with old legends/folklore. An Indian grave site is found, that leads to these little bird like mummy things running lose and eating people. There was a bit of a side story with the main character and why he moved out to this town, but it was not really needed. It could have just been his wife passed away, but instead it goes into how she was drunk, and he found her cheating on him. She goes after him and falls/is pushed down the stairs. Then a cop decides to follow him to this new town and blackmail him. That cop gets eaten so why add the extra drama? I feel it distracted from the main story more than it helped it. Also, instead of "I'm" being used it was Tm. I think it was an auto correct thing, but there were other spelling errors which drove me nuts lol. Still a very fun read and really good pace. Whole story only covers a couple of days, which makes it more believable. I definitely enjoyed this book.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very entertaining horror novel about strange critters invading a southwest desert town . I remember reading this when it first came out in 1980 .

[Jim Lay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Someone liked my Amazon review of this novel so much, they posted it as their own review on Goodreads. Interesting...
My review: "I love a good monster novel (or "critter novel" as we say in the south). And Thomas F. Monteleone conjures a whole nasty horde of them in NIGHT THINGS... A construction crew accidentally unearths a cavern in the desert. It is the tomb of an ancient evil that the Indians bound to the underworld in an effort to save mankind. But now they are free and there'll be hell to pay for the residents of a nearby town. When darkness falls, a horde of mummified demon-like trolls crawl forth and begin to devour and feed like pirhanas... If you love horror like I do, and you enjoy a good critter story, with a fun b-movie flavor to it, then I highly recommend you seek this one out. It's probably hard to find these days, but well worth the search."

[Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the Book that made me a Thomas F Monteleone Fan.
It Broke my cherry into his novels as it was my first by him.
I originally read this in the late 80's.
It is creepy and scary from start to finish

[Lybo Buchanan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book back in the 70s, gave it to my sister to read, & we still talk about the book. The Night Things scared the S@!$%% out of us. I still remember the "click, clicking"

[Beverley Bacinski-Jenkins · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nothing But A Hollywood Monster Story

Lost interest about halfway through this sad attempt to bring AmerIndian folklore to life by depicting the ancient supernatural terrorizing (what else?) a small town. Populated by some characters who are present only to be killed off by monsters, this story was in bad need of editing with typographical errors abundant in an overly long and boring story.

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

Horribly dated, and not in a charming way. The casual racism and misogyny were hair-raising. Structurally, the book mostly worked, but the editing was distractingly sloppy in places. If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn't read it. I am, as ever, a victim of my compulsion to finish books when there are at least one or two characters that I want to know how it ends for.

[Brent Winslow · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had a lot going for it - character development, and a believable New Mexico location, but the titular night things were more comical than scary, and like many of Monteleone's books, the ending fell flat.

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

A story about Tony Cavella, who moves from St. Louis to a small New Mexico town with his twelve-year-old daughter to take over his later father's newspaper. Unfortunately for him, and the residents of the town, a construction job in the desert has unearthed an ancient Indian burial ground, letting loose the titular "night things", short, birdlike creatures destined to punish those who disturb the dead. Thankfully, there is a local wise old Indian who may be able to help.

Among the other characters in the story: The Sheriff and his good-natured deputy; several gruff members of a construction crew; a malicious busybody who takes pleasure in destroying the lives of her fellow townspeople; a cross-dresser and his overweight wife; a mentally ill man who can only make strange noises in lieu of speech; a grumpy old reporter who works for the newspaper; a shopkeeper who is a recent transplant and who becomes a love interest for our protagonist; a crooked cop intent on blackmail; a singer/waitress stuck in town on her slow way to California; and assorted other minor characters.

Seems like a lot of characters, but not to worry: most get few pages spent on them, with quite a few serving as fodder for the night things. Upon finishing the book, I wondered why some of the characters were even included in the story. The whole blackmil plot and backstory behind it seemed a waste of ink. It turns out that Tony caught his late wife in bed with another man. His wife reacted by trying to attack him with a knife, and in the ensuing struggle fell down some stairs and died. The crooked cop promises to ruin Tony's standing in town (and with his daughter) by sharing that the late Mrs. Cavella's lover claimed Tony murdered her. Don't worry, thought; this guy will die off-screen (or off-page, I suppose) and so won't be a problem by book's end. This plotline seemed unnecessary and serves only to introduce an element of danger (aside than the night things).

The love story between Tony and Lori, the shopkeeper, sees them falling in love despite knowing each other for about a day, with Tony even leaving his daughter in her care on the spur of the moment after their first meeting. Leaving his kid in the care of strangers becomes something of a habit for Tony as he traipses around town with Sheriff Lopez, who inextricably allows this newcomer to accompany him to multiple scenes of violence, even entusting him with a shotgun at one point. The sheriff even lets Tony use a victim's phone to make a call as they await the arrival of the medical examiner. And this is after they and a deputy have been all over the house. Why? Because apparently Sheriff Lopez learned policing from the Boulder PD. (Do people still get JonBenet Ramsey references?) Another thing that bugged me: The town crazyman seems somehow immune to the night things for reasons that are never explained.
The climax, when it cmes, is swift and, for me, disatisfyingly anticlimactic. The wise old Indian does a little ritual taught to him by his father. Or was it his grandfather? I can't remember. The ritual causes the night things to break off their attack in town and return to the burial pit from whence they came. I did like the Indian having doubts about whether his ritual would work. Many times these type of characters are filled with unearned unertainty.

So, what about the book did I like? Tony's daughter was likeable, managing to be convincingly older-than-her-years while still retaining childlike qualities. The singer/waitress's story was an interesting one even if it was never fully fleshed out and her character was superfluous, serving no real role in the story. The town busybody was a character you love to hate, though she was as superfluous as the singer/waitress.

This was the first book I've read by the author after recognizing his name for some reason despite not finding any of his other works in my books-I've-read lists, and I doubt I'll read another. The book wasn't terrible, but "wasn't terrible" is understandably faint praise. It's a 2.5/5 for me, rounded down to 2/5 for Goodreads.

[Stokely Klasovsky · Rating 2 out of 5]

I recalled reading a short story when I was young, in which a boy found an unusual Native American artifact at a construction site, took it home, then faced an unexpected horror as it emerged from its urn-like confines in the arid darkness of a Southwestern basement. It turns out this story was either an excerpt or a generative seed from "Night Things," an ignoble horror novel from the 80's that does few things successfully; the excerpt clearly provided the most entertaining portion of the novel. Monteleone's attempt to elude predictability by introducing 'victim characters' did little more than assist in making the story's central characters appear pale and underdeveloped. The ancillary characters who populate the city provide some of the story's flavor, but they're few and far between, arriving late in the novel and not staying around long enough to matter. Several poorly handled plot lines, such as that of the blackmailer whose plan (conveniently) never materialized beyond its inception, generated frayed edges throughout the story, their goal of providing varied shades of excitement turning out to be pallid and unfulfilled. Even the story's monsters, situationally reminiscent of the creatures in the B-movie series "Tremors," started out as ossified, lightning-quick raptor skulls who eventually slowed to become fragile, snipe/meat-grinder hybrids, pausing mid-pounce to accept their shotgun blasts. I may have appreciated this novel more in its natural habitat (a.k.a. 1980) before thousands of similar novels stampeded the shelves of Walden Books and B. Dalton, but I doubt I would've appreciated it much more than I do now.

[Stokely Klasovsky · Rating 2 out of 5]

I recalled reading a short story when I was young, in which a boy found an unusual Native American artifact buried at a construction site, took it home, then faced the unexpected horror that emerged from its confines after he hid it in the corner of his family's basement. It turns out this story was either an excerpt or a generative seed from "Night Things," an ignoble horror novel from the 80's that does few things successfully; the excerpt clearly provided the most entertaining portion of the novel. Monteleone's attempt to elude predictability by introducing victim characters did little more than make the story's central characters appear pale and underdeveloped. The ancillary characters who populate the city provide most of the story's flavor, but they're few and far between, arriving late in the novel and not sticking around long enough to matter much. Some poorly handled plot lines, such as the blackmailer whose plot line (conveniently) never materialized beyond its inception, generated frayed edges throughout the story, their goal of providing varied shades of excitement turning out to be pallid and unfulfilled. Even the story's monsters, which somehow reminded me of the creatures in the movie "Tremors," started out as ossified, lightning-quick raptor skulls who eventually slowed to become snipe/meat-grinder hybrids, pausing in mid-air to await their shotgun blasts. I may have appreciated this novel more in its natural habitat (a.k.a. 1980) before thousands of of similar novels stampeded the shelves of Walden Books and B. Dalton, but I doubt I would've appreciated it much more than I do now.