Monday, June 20, 2011

Great Horror Crime Suspense Fiction 2011 - The Guardians by Andrew Pyper

The Guardians is a brilliant, atmospheric dark fiction about male friendship, darkest corners of the mind, and a haunted house. Several people will compare The Guardians to It by Stephen King, however, It is a masterpiece of horror, whilst The Guardian is a fine psychological horror/suspense novel in its own way. (Even if King is still the one and only King, impossible to outshine).

The Guardians by Andrew Pyper

In The Guardians, past and present intermingle. Four friends, Trevor, Ben, Randy, and Carl grew up in a small, dull Ontario town named Grimshaw. They are normal, happy adolescents, members of the local hockey team Grimshaw Guardians. One day they entered the abandoned Thurman house – from the inside, its angles and spaces seemed oddly distorted (one more time, a Stephen King recall: the setting of The Dark House, written by King and Peter Straub, was rather similar). In the cellar something unthinkable occurred – there was something in the house, and the adolescents also unleashed their own darkest sides… They knew what happened to their music teacher, yet they never told a word to anyone. When they grow up, Ben remains in the town, his windows are opposite the Thurman house. He keeps vigil: until he is alert, the thing that haunts the house cannot escape from there. However, twenty-four years after the case in the cellar Ben commits suicide. The remaining three men (they are in their early forties, Trevor, an once night club owner who suffers from Parkinson disease, Randy, an actor who never made it, and Carl, a drug abuser) returns to Grimshaw, and face their frightful memories. After Ben’s funeral, a young woman disappears, and the three friends return to the Thurman house…

The Canadian author Andrew Pyper’s first suspense/dark fantasy novel, Lost Girls, became a bestseller in Canada in 1999 and made its way up to the Notable Book selection of The New York Times Book Review in 2000. It also won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel. The Guardians is Andrew Pyper’s fifth novel.

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