Review: The Devil Tree by Steve Vernon
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 6, 2012
I like horror. I like scare me, worry me and make me check the locks on the doors and windows just one more time before I go to bed horror. I want to be scared, I want it to be creepy but my gosh I want it to have a point.Lucas and Tamsen, husband and wife, are travelling the Greensnake river in a raft carrying all their worldly goods with them in order to find land to homestead. The river becomes too swift and Lucas loses control. They are pulled out of the river by Duvall and taken into his home with his pregnant wife Jezebel and step-son Cord. But all is not well in the Duvall home and evil in on the menu.I would call this a basic "good vs evil" horror story but no one in this tale is good. Each has a past of which they are ashamed and each has reasons they don't want that past to be revealed.The tree, a protagonist in its own right, is never explained in a way we can understand. It simply is evil for no reason other than being evil. The other protagonists, other than Duvall, are flat and at least in one case, boring. The most interesting character, was the young boy whose personality developed too late in the story for him to have much impact."The Devil Tree" left me feeling like I had read a horror book in search of a literary award. It was slow and sluggish due to the over use of similes and metaphors, the repetition of information and the addition of meaningless characters that added nothing to the plot. I didn't find it scary at all. At most it was mildly interesting and that only due to the writing style.All I can say is the story was okay. Nothing special and nothing I would read again. But I would read something else by this author to see how his writing style works with another genre or a different premise.Karen Bryant DoeringParent's Little Black Book