John Saul's Blackstone Chronicles

The Blackstone Chronicles

I'd never heard of  John Saul before I read his book The Blackstone Chronicles, but the book came as a recommendation from my mother, who reads just about as much or maybe more than I do. Though she only reads pulp bestseller books and not thick dramatic affairs that are deemed the best novels, she knows what's entertaining or just a bunch of dribble, so I normally take her opinions seriously.

So I picked up The Blackstone Chronicles, John Saul's attempt at the serial novel after Stephen King had had much success with his Green Mile series. John Saul started writing around the 1970s, his early works including Suffer the Children and Punish the Sinners. His novel looked interesting, and I am definitely one to judge a book by its cover to get a first impression, hoping that the actual story will blow me away.

The book that I read was an omnibus edition containing the six parts of the story that Saul had previously released. Since the book I had collected all six parts, this review will encompass the whole story rather than just each separate part.

The story takes place in Blackstone, a town known for its dependence on the shadowy Blackstone Asylum, which looms ominously on a hill over the town. The Asylum was owned by our main protagonist's, Oliver Metcalf, family, although it has since been abandoned and is about to be renovated to accommodate a new mall. Oliver is part of this committee, fully agreeing to the change of the asylum as he harbors strange memories of the place. Throughout each part in the novel, strange items from the Asylum's past turn up in the houses of the Blackstone residences, with horrific results. Oliver is driven to find out what is going on, especially after his love interest, Rebecca, disappears. In the end, he finds the terrible secret of both the town and the Asylum, and the evil that is harbored inside of himself.

Saul's premise is not very original - tons of stories have been centered on the secrets of a town and how the past can reappear in the future. Stephen King's Needful Things immediately comes to mind, its plot closely resembling that of The Blackstone Chronicles. In both, deadly items become the basis of the plot and character studies are what drive the narrative.

Yet even with the familiar territory that Saul traverses, the items are interesting and varied enough to keep the reader moving forward. The ways in which the haunting secrets come to life, with quick flashbacks and exposition that shows the strange coincidences between past and present incidences, are engaging and abstract to keep the reader's attention. Short chapters also play a part in this, because each acts as a mini-cliffhanger. Saul also uses the partitioning of the story to his advantage, because it allows him to create short stories that eventually meld together in the conclusion. It's a fascinating idea that, for the most part, succeeds.

The structure of the novel can become a little tired, however; each part begins and ends similarly, and so there's a tendency for the story to become predictable. After the second part, it's easy to piece together what will happen in the next part - someone will receive an item, go a little cuckoo-cuckoo, and then something will end up dead. This can be overlooked, though, because of the creativity that Saul brings to each mini-conclusion. Although not completely surprising, there are small twists that mix it up a bit.

Saul does a great job of providing backstory on each character. With just around a hundred pages to toy around with plot and characterization, Saul devotes enough time to each to have the audience care about the character while creating a lot of tension. I liked how both character and plot tied in to each other so much that you couldn't have one without the other, because the characters are the most important element to the story. But though the characters are likable, they seem a little too unrealistic for my tastes. One thing that stuck out was how each man felt the same. We get the perspectives of three men, and even though they differ in tiny ways, I felt like all of their personalities were the same. The women, however, were quite varied.

Saul has a bad habit of crafting convoluted, long sentences, especially towards the beginning of the novel, and it bogged the reading down a bit. Later on, when the plot thickens, the sentences begin to shorten, which mimics the fast pace of the story and helps the reader forget about his complicated and wordy sentences that occurred before. Saul is more effective with his shorter, precise sentences, and would do well to stick with these.

The ending seems to fall off a bit, and this reviewer would have liked to have seen more of an intense climax and falling action, but you can't have everything. Enjoyable and fast-paced, Saul offers up a series of parts that seem stronger as short stories than they do as one novel. Their strength is in their ability to stand alone, which is a considerable feat when the parts are supposed to add up to a whole. Saul does a good job of tying each part together, but there's always a feeling that the knots the stories are connected by are very close to breaking.