Review: Without Question, Deluca's Best Work To Date
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 08 30, 2013
Sandy Deluca has released her most mainstream tale yet with Messages From The Dead, and in the process she has written one of the best horror novella's of the year.In Messages From The Dead we meet Donna, a young married woman who feels lost and seeks a way to define herself, and she hopes to do so through art.  She enrolls in a community college called Castell to study painting, and while there she manages to obtain a part time job as a clerk.  Donna soon hears ghostly children's voices and sees people disappearing into wisps of vapor, and she comes to suspect that the school is haunted.  She is familiar with the dead returning as her grandmother has always practiced the dark arts, and when Donna was young she had witnessed on several occasions her grandmother conjuring those that have passed on.  But those experiences as a young child were for the most part benign, and the ones that are occurring at Castell increasingly are not. Soon Donna and her fellow artist and friend, Andrea, are caught in the middle of some type of ghostly retribution-with Donna discovering that she has a part in the games that the dead are playing.Stylistically, Messages From The Dead is not all that different from Deluca's earlier work; it's brooding, heavily atmospheric, and the horror is decidedly introspective.  What's changed is the plotting and her narrative.  The plotting in Messages From The Dead is more opaque: it's a straight-forward tale of haunting, and the subplots are more contained than in her previous works as well.  Her narrative is also more focused in this novella; there is very little jumping around in terms of flash-backs or recollections when compared to her other stories and this serves to speed the plot along at a fairly good clip (I read this in two sittings).Deluca's characterization is dead on as usual.  Donna is written as humanly any character I've ever read.  Her marital problems, her longing for identity, her sexual awareness, and her striving for acceptance are portrayed so realistically that the reader can't help but identify Donna with someone they know...or themselves.Messages From The Dead is a horror tale that accomplishes what all good horror should do; it's an absorbing read, it's imaginative, the scares are many and they are tangible.  Messages From The Dead is so good that the practice of comparing Sandy Deluca to other contemporary author's should end - she will be the one newer authors will be graded against.  There is no doubt in my mind that this novella will define Deluca as a master horror writer for years to come.Please, don't hesitate to pick up Messages From The Dead.