THE HOUSE OF TONGUES

A man desperately seeks to escape an old family curse in this novel.

In this tale from Dashner, the author of the Maze Runner series of YA adventures, events turn from SF to psychological horror. The story focuses on single father David Player, who’s trying his best to raise his four kids while continuing to deal with the long shadows of his own childhood trauma. As he drives his children through the South Carolina tobacco fields to their grandfather’s house, the narrative flashes back to his childhood encounters with a vicious, homegrown serial killer named Pee Wee Gaskins. In the present, David and his family finally reach the house. But Dicky, Pee Wee’s son, suddenly appears and proceeds to almost choke to death. The shocked David muses: “This son of a killer said he came to see me. He then choked on his own tongue, for no apparent reason. And my son, who’d never showed us the slightest hint that he knew the first thing about saving a person in such dire straits, had done just that.” Readers gradually come to realize alongside David that Pee Wee’s evil might not be done stalking his family. The author’s long writing experience is a double-edged sword in this novel.  On the one hand, he skillfully crafts a riveting narrative; the first-person storytelling will keep readers turning pages. But on the other hand, habits picked up in a career of writing books for teenagers can yield some uneven prose (“There are many who think I’m a murderer,” confesses David early on. “Worse than a murderer. A monster. A monster so monstrous that never before has a world seen such a monstrous monster”) as well as some baffling turns of phrase (“But alas, it’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, as the lawyers are wont to say”). It’s bailiffs, not lawyers, who are wont to say this. There’s also a tendency to mimic the tinny, faux folksiness of Stephen King: “People around town said old Pee Wee Gaskins could dig a grave faster than Parson Fincher could say a burial prayer. I wasn’t so sure about that, but figured it’d be a tight race, anyhow.” Still, readers who can overlook these flaws will find a fun, chilling tale here.

A gripping, entertaining, but sometimes uneven horror story.