Book Review: "Walkers" by Graham Masterton

You know how much of a fan of cheap books on my phone I am. Well, this is no exception. Graham Masterton is a really good author and honestly, though I've only read a couple of his books, there have often been some pretty interesting horror novels around the area. I'm quite surprised that more people haven't read this one considering it has such a great, classic kind of story. It feels like a cross between some sort of Stephen King novel and The Haunting of Hill House in a way. It feels very obsessive. I couldn't help myself. I told myself to go to bed at a reasonable hour, but this book definitely had other plans for me.

Jack is a husband and a father with a steady job where he eyes up a young divorcee named Karen on ocassion. Yes, he eyes up other women even though he's married. The one thing I found when it came to Jack is that under no circumstances would I hang out with this guy ever. He doesn't really have much of a backbone and seems like a really unlikeable human being. But the book begins not by showing us who he is in real life, instead it shows him almost accidentally hitting a child with his car. When he gets out of the car to see where the child - the child is nowhere to be found. And then they are, and then they aren't, and then they're made of newspaper. A child, or maybe it's not a child at all.

As Jack roams the grounds of a mysterious building he can't ever remember being on the grounds where he once spent days with friends, he discovers that this place is beyond his wildest dreams. He thinks about opening a country club - he has waking dreams about it whilst traversing the winding hallways and going up and down the stairs. He looks at the mesh on the inside of the windows, meaning that instead of protecting the windows from breaking from the outside, the main concern was someone breaking them from the inside. But he keeps seeing the child. Until he doesn't. When he returns home, his wife is upset at his lateness and he tells her about his plans for a country club. They argue, she isn't convinced and their son - Randy, a precocious nine-year-old boy, wakes up.

Eventually, Jack becomes obsessed with the building, he takes Karen (yes, Karen, not his wife) to see it one day with Randy. He tells Karen all about what happened with the strange child-but-probably-not-a-child on that weird evening. Randy on the other hand, gets lost in the building and starts talking to someone who calls themselves 'Lester'. However, Lester disappears when Jack tries to find Randy and shaken, the boy leaves with his dad to go home. The obsession with the building and the absent-minded daydreaming causes Jack's wife to leave him. She initially takes Randy but drops him off again when she learns Randy has 'made a friend' at the building. His father initially doesn't believe him but as Randy starts to expand on the topic, he realises there is something deeply wrong and he must return to the house. He takes Karen with him.

The atmosphere is heavy, the terrain is deeply rooted in the American gothic and there seems to be a heavy fog hanging over Masterton's writing as if everyone knows a secret only you and Jack aren't aware of. I love the writing style and the way in which Jack's life becomes interwoven with the place he inevitably buys. There's a lurking feeling constantly around the building and though we cannot put our fingers on what exactly is wrong, there's dimensions and details Masterton shows us to remind us that this place is not, and never was, normal.

As we get deeper into the story, we not only find out about the love story between Karen and Jack, but we notice that Randy - the son who had seen 'Lester' - has gone missing. Whilst Karen and Jack search for Randy, there is clearly something else happening in the building that is not entirely clear and as characters such as Quintus and Joseph become involved in the story, we start to realise that perhaps we don't know everything about the building known as The Oaks.

The story starts really strong, it's interesting and we don't know exactly what is happening - we assume it is just a normal haunted house story. It isn't. As it moves, we get atmosphere, folk horror and the haunted past coming to life. However, the scenes where there is a lot of action - such as the last 30-40 pages, does not seem to be as strong as the rest of the book. It was definitely a strong book even though the ending wasn't great. I am still going to give this one a high mark purely because it was enjoyable.