Lacuna's Point by Tim Meyer

There is a place that may or may not exist with a clock tower that may or may not be sinister. Or who are we kidding here? You know what kind of novel this is. You know the genre. The place is definitely there if you look for it. The clock tower is definitely evil.
But wait, there’s more. There’s an entire town and a very creepy mayor that’s dedicated to …arts, of all things. Yeah, creeps like the finer things in life. You can say it nourishes them. In a disturbingly literal sort of way.
The novel opens in a rather clichéd fashion, with two girls/young women driving out of their way to the eponymous place for an art festival and a boy and stepping into some local-flavored cosmic doodoo. Not a particularly impressive beginning at all, even the language is like “towering clock tower.”
But then the novel pivots very nicely. First off, it brings some adults in. Now the leads are the parents” the mother of one of the girls and the father of another. It’s been three years, and now, both of them get cryptic text messages from their daughters telling them to come find them.
So, they do. They find the same creepy town, the same creepy clock tower, the same creepy mayor, and get properly embroiled in all that’s going on there.
In size and mode and sheer number of characters, the novel is pretty epic. It’s very long. Too long for my taste, actually, but it reads pretty dynamically. I wasn’t particularly engaged with any of the characters, but the town intrigued me conceptually.
In fact, the concept was fun enough for me to round up my rating of the book.
Meyer is a competent writer with an impressive imagination, so his take on cosmic is pretty fun. All in all, a solid read with a lot to enjoy for genre fans.