August's Eyes by Glenn Rolfe

Being the first person to review this book for Goodreads I’ll try to make it as objective and informational as possible. So here we go, you probably heard this before, but 25 years ago something terrible took place in a small town in Maine, something involving kids and a depraved evil being. Fast forward to the future and the past comes creeping back, slowly, through nightmares of a boy, now man, who thought he was so good at forgetting.
Pure King territory, really, nostalgia steeped past rolling into the increasingly dangerous present. And Rolfe does his absolute utmost to do the oh so familiar theme justice. To be fair, there are very few authors like Rolfe, he’s a lifelong trier and I admire that. Most authors, it seems, are either great right out of the gate or not and never get there, but Rolfe has actually steadily improved over the years, I’ve literally read his progress, it’s all there. Mind you, he isn’t going to hit King level any time soon, but just about every single book of his read chronologically is an improvement upon its predecessor and he’s now at the really decent level, finally. This book showed that off amply. The writing, the dialogue and especially the characters worked very well. Did he go over the top with the dream sequences? Yeah, probably. But you have a nicely creepy atmospheric scary story with some really decent characters and it makes for a pretty fun read.
I know I only offered plot generics until now, so here’s some more…main protagonist, 40, nice guy, happily married, good person, helps others for a living, kinda lonely, his only friend seems to be a local enterprising almost 16 year old kid (by far the best character in the book), dreams terrible dreams about the past he can’t remember, but apparently didn’t quite forget either. The wife seemed ok at first, but then her biological clock going off and it’s all you hear, in fact she cries for so much of the book, you almost expect her to just float away eventually. Rolfe also uses her as an homaging tools for some of his favorite authors, it seems. The man has a genuine love for the genre and it’s cute and all, but his fanboy approach results in namedropping (old man Keisling down the devil’s Creek road) that personally I find kind of distracting. Some genre fans might enjoy that sort of thing, though. Like an Easter egg.
Anyway, there’s also a highly sadistic pederastic serial killer, Native American legends, nice town with a not so nice (creepy, murderous) past and way too many cemeteries, etc. It’s like Rolfe knows the kind of novel he’s writing and checks every box on the list. Right down to the positively emotionally manipulative and oh so warm and cozy ending.
And yeah, it may not be all that original, but it’s genuinely entertaining and it reads quickly and has lots of spooky thrills for genre fans. Thanks Netgalley.