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Night Terrors
By Drew Williams
Barclay Books, LLC
1-931402-24-8
343 Pages
6 / 2001
Reviewed by Phillip Tomasso III, author of The Third Ring and The Tenth House
Night Terrors opens with a chill. The way Drew Williams' writes will demand a reader's attention. If you enjoy intense horror, it will be hard to put this book down and not have the story consume your thoughts until you pick it up again. Night Terrors is that consuming.
A small, quiet town is suddenly jarred by a series of bizarre deaths and suicides and Detective Steve Wycoff knows there must be something more going on. David Cavanough may not have any answers, but his nights are distraught and terrifying as a creature insists on haunting his dreams. Nathan Espy's father may have been mentally negligent and physically abuse,
but now the baseball star, with the Coach's help, is in control . . . or at least his body is.
Dust. He goes by many names, but most know him as Dust. He must come when he is summoned . . . but why someone would be willing invite such a creature into their dreams is a mystery. It is when Cavanough's father-in-law, a doctor intent on helping people overcome phobias in their sleep, forces him into his patients nightmares that the horrors spill from
dreams into realities.
Though the doctor kept Dust in control, when the doctor dies and the family comes together, all Hell breaks loose. See the good doctor didn't just infect his patients with the devil of dreams, he infected many others, as well. And now Dust plans to escape from dreams and seek revenge and it is up to the town's detective and Cavanough to put a stop to an ancient evil.
Like Stephen King's Needful Things, Night Terrors introduces a plot as compelling and as thoroughly frightening as any book I've ever read. Glued to the pages, sucked in by the menacing plot, getting to the end of the book was something I had to do. The suspense was killing me. Williams has written an engrossing and fear-provoking horror novel. Many horror novels pass through my hands without giving them much thought. Night Terrors is the kind of book that has kept me up at night.