The Forbidden Zone - Hardcover

Whitley, Strieber

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0450603997 ISBN 13: 9780450603990

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton General Division, 1994

Synopsis

Whitley Strieber has long been renowned as one of America's most spellbinding storytellers, a writer whose novels have consistently broken new ground in the exploration of the dark unknown. With The Forbidden Zone, he continues his journey beyond the cutting edge of terrifying suspense into the sphere of a relentless psychological thriller only he could have written. Every small town has a special place like the mound. Lovers go there to woo, families picnic in summer, children sled in winter. For the community of Oscola, New York, the mound has never been dangerous...until now. Now something beyond cunning or imagining, something that appears undeniably evil is hiding beneath the mound. The terror comes from out of time, space, and the depths of the human mind with its alien needs and desires. It spreads its roots in secret...changing, transforming, reshaping reality. It seeks to sweep aside all that the good townfolk love and cherish: their past, their hopes, the promise of their souls. It fills the innocent earth with its presence - it screams with power. How can ordinary people protect themselves from this evil? How can they fight its weapon of soulbreaking potency - a sweetly seductive yet unspeakably savage pleasure too intense to resist? Brian Kelly, a courageous physicist still grieving over the hideous death of his first wife and child, suspects that the shell of reality must have been torn to let in this monstrosity. He must discover a way to repair the rift. His very pregnant second wife, Loi, a beautiful and brilliant refugee from the pain of Vietnam, has battled demons before. She's ready to dare anything to save her unborn son. The tough yet dangerously vulnerable EllenMaas, a big-city reporter trying to revive the local paper, must finally commit to destroying the beast - or perish herself. Bob West, a cop who saw every kind of madness and violence during the war, will return to the law of the jungle - or worse - if it will save his family.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

The Bookcassette® format is a special recording technique developed as a means of condensing the full, unabridged audio text of a book to record it on fewer tapes. In order to listen to these tapes, you will need a cassette player with balance control to adjust left/right speaker output. Special adaptors to allow these tapes to be played on any cassette player are available through the publisher or some US retail electronics stores.

From Kirkus Reviews

Strieber's horror novels often rework classic occult themes (Unholy Fire: possession; The Hunger: vampirism, etc). Now, in an unusually spooky--and splattery--offering, the author updates the monstrous mythos of H.P. Lovecraft, to whom he dedicates the book. The eerie doings pile on quickly, beginning with physicist Brian Kelly hearing screams emanating from a mound in his hometown of Oscola, New York. Years back, Brian's first wife and child died in a fire, and ever since he's been a wreck, abandoning his time- travel experiments and cringing at the screams he still can hear- -and so Brian wonders whether he's imagining this scream, until his new and pregnant Vietnamese wife, Loi, also hears it. A dig, however, reveals only dirt. But later that night, newspaperwoman Ellen Maas visits the dig and is swarmed by a horde of huge lightning bugs that nearly suffocates her, while Brian, also returning to the mound, is mesmerized by purple lights that crackle with sexual energy. The next day, screaming is heard at another site, and this time digging reveals the corpse of a woman, every bone in her body pulverized--but her left eye still glimmering with evil intent. Ellen and Brian team up to investigate, evoking Loi's jealousy--but when the menace fully reveals itself in the form of further animate corpses bursting open to loose further swarms of lightning bugs, the corpses then mutating into gigantic tentacled creatures that ferociously shred the town and its inhabitants--it's Loi who leads the fight. But can she combat this superintelligent creature, freed from a parallel universe by Brian's old experiments, before it destroys her--as well as her baby, squirming to be born? Genuinely scary, with plenty of scattered body parts for gorehounds--but subtle it is not, and the Providence recluse was scarier still, by saying less and implying far more. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton General Division
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0450603997
• ISBN 13: 9780450603990
• Binding: Hardcover