December Park
Some novelists find something that works and stick with it for years; others like to jump around, experimenting with genres and writing styles. Malfi appears to be one of the latter. Although most of his novels fall into the thriller, horror, or sf genre, they are stylistically quite different. This one, about a group of teenage friends living in a Maryland beach community from which some children have gone missing, feels a bit like Stephen King crossed with Dennis Lehane—specifically, the early portions of King’s It melded with ­Lehane’s Mystic River. But, just as Lehane doesn’t sound very much like King, so Malfi doesn’t sound much like either of them. He has his own voice, and he’s telling his own story, one that begins with some disappearances, segues into murder, and ends with a violent confrontation. Malfi is a man of many voices, a sort of literary version of Mel Blanc (the “man of a thousand voices”), but all of his voices are captivating, though none of them quite the same. Horror and crime fans will find much to like here. --David Pitt