Tom Deady's Haven REVIEWED

I've wanted to read this one for a long while. Tom Deady nabbed the 2016 Bram Stoked for Superior Achievement in a first novel on this one, and garnered lots of praise for it in the horror community, by a lot of people whose opinions I respect.

Thing is, 2016 was a hell of a year for first novels. There was some great stuff coming out, including one of my personal favorites, Mayan Blue, by the immensely talented Michelle Garza and Melissa Lason. Basically I wanted to know who the hell had the chops to beat that fantastic book out.

So, I got to my searching to get my hands on a copy...and the damn thing was sold out. Cemetery Dance put out a limited edition hardcover, a few hundred copies, and they were all gone. So, for me, Haven crawled to the dark, deepest caverns of my ever-loaded brain and to me, the real winner was Mayan Blue.

2017 rolls around and as things go, Haven is out in a much more attainable trade paperback, self published by the author. He was nice enough to send me a copy to review the thing, and here we are.

Haven. In all 500 pages of it's glory.

The first thing I noticed when the book arrived was it's daunting appearance. This thing is HUGE! It's also a very good looking book, with some very alluring cover art that just screams..."read me, read me!".

Huge and good looking, just like yours truly.

But, I have learned the hardest of hard ways to never again judge a book by its beautiful cover...I see you, William W. Johnstone...

Thankfully, the book is almost as good as it looks. It is beautifully written, with equally effectively written characters who you want to either hug the hell out of, or punch to smithereens. It's daunting size thankfully moves by at a reasonable pace, in part due to Deady's decision to keep the chapters short.

In it's pretty perfect writing, Haven tells the story of the titular small Massachusettes town and it's residents, who are plagued by murders and disappearences every 16 years or so. A warm and gentle disfigured man, Paul Greymore, is framed for these crimes and away he goes to the jailhouse. But he's innocent...

When he gets out, the murders start right back up. Greymore pairs up with a handful of allies who know his innocence to be true, namely a local priest and a pair of young, teenage boys to take on the evil of Haven, both supernatural and otherwise.

Haven is a very good book, with a very engaging story to be told. Deady nails the small New England town thing, spot on. I am a Rhode Island resident myself, with Southeastern Massachusettes bordering my town. I swear I have met these characters before, driven down these streets, maybe even swam in the lake where most of the horror in Haven occurs.

That being said, I've got a few qualms with the book. Regardless of it's reasonable pace, it's overlong, with some nuances hammered into the readers head ad naseum. The Sheriff is an incredibly evil man. We are given endless examples of how. The bullies are flawed teenagers who are victims themselves. Endless examples. Billy and Denny? Good natured kids. Endless examples. You pick up what I'm putting down?

The reasonable pace can be attributed to a few things...one a positive, one a negative. The positive is my favorite quality a book can have...short chapters! This lends itself to my busy life. I can bang out a chapter whenever I get moment, then come back to it when I get another...or I can just binge read 20 chapters if I have the time. I wish all authors would do this!

The negative is it's overwhelming familiarity. It's no secret Deady is a King fan. No attempts are made at keeping it secretive either. If someone told me this was a missing book from King's back catalogue and I didn't know better, I would believe it. Which is fine, pretty much the industry standard for a while there.

But yo, let's punch some industry standards in 2017! Break some molds, writers! Be bold and travel to where no horror author has before! Be more than fine...make me say, "HOLY SHIT! THAT JUST HAPPENED!"

Deady does that enough for me to stay into it. But, I really could have used a bit more surprise. Especially towards the end of the book.

Do not let me deter you from this book though. It's a good one, well worth reading. A bit out of the realm what I, objectively, tend to LOVE about horror fiction, but that doesn't mean it's not good.

An analogy I thought up while reviewing this...This thing is ready for 2017's Barnes and Noble "Fiction" section, while I'm at 1992's Waldenbooks Horror shelves/walls. Know what I'm getting at? This is a high-brow affair. Ya boy over here, likes his tongue a little deeper in the cheek.

So for that, I'm giving it two grades.

I am giving it a 3.5/5 for MY reading taste.
Giving it a 4.5/5 for everyone else.

It's a very good book. Just not my thing. If it makes any sense to you, I'll still take Mayan Blue over this. But Bram Stoker wanted Haven. And Bram Stoker holds more weight than Brandon St. Pierre in the world of horror fiction.

My advice is absolutely get yourself a copy and find out how you feel about it.

You can do so here.