Title: 14
Author: Peter
Clines
Publisher: Permuted
Press
Publication Date: June
5, 2012
Genres: Mystery,
Sci-fi, Paranormal
Reviewed by: Angie
Edwards
My rating: 5/5
SUMMARY
Padlocked doors. Strange light fixtures. Mutant
cockroaches.
There are some odd things about Nate’s new apartment.
Of course, he has other things on his mind. He hates his job. He has no money in the bank. No girlfriend. No plans for the future. So while his new home isn’t perfect, it’s livable. The rent is low, the property managers are friendly, and the odd little mysteries don’t nag at him too much.
At least, not until he meets Mandy, his neighbor across the hall, and notices something unusual about her apartment. And Xela’s apartment. And Tim’s. And Veek’s.
Because every room in this old Los Angeles brownstone has a mystery or two. Mysteries that stretch back over a hundred years. Some of them are in plain sight. Some are behind locked doors. And all together these mysteries could mean the end of Nate and his friends.
Or the end of everything...
There are some odd things about Nate’s new apartment.
Of course, he has other things on his mind. He hates his job. He has no money in the bank. No girlfriend. No plans for the future. So while his new home isn’t perfect, it’s livable. The rent is low, the property managers are friendly, and the odd little mysteries don’t nag at him too much.
At least, not until he meets Mandy, his neighbor across the hall, and notices something unusual about her apartment. And Xela’s apartment. And Tim’s. And Veek’s.
Because every room in this old Los Angeles brownstone has a mystery or two. Mysteries that stretch back over a hundred years. Some of them are in plain sight. Some are behind locked doors. And all together these mysteries could mean the end of Nate and his friends.
Or the end of everything...
REVIEW
He looked at her.
“When he flipped the switch and the ground started shaking,” he
said, “you saw the sun go away?”
She nodded.
“It wasn’t clouds,” he said. “It was going out.”
Veek blinked. She opened her mouth, shut it, then blinked again.
“What?”
“Right in front of my eyes,” said Nate. “It turned red, the
whole sky got dark around it, and the sun started to go out.”
Now, my
dear bookworm friends, tell me that little snippet there didn’t get your
curiosity levels skyrocketing. Be honest, you want to know what the heck just
happened there, right? What in this world can possibly make the sun go out with
the flip of a switch? Well, imagine this. You move into an apartment building
and not long after moving in, you discover the strangest things. I can’t tell you
what strange things, because you have to discover it all on your own. Maybe
I’ll give you a tiny little hint: seven-legged luminescent green cockroaches
that won’t touch food. Yep, cruel evil woman that I am, I’m only going to give
you that one tiny clue that things aren’t at all what they seem in the Kavach
apartment building where the rent is practically nothing AND includes
utilities. Anyone’s dream apartment, you’d think. Well...no. And I’ll bet
you’ll never in a million years be able to guess what’s behind the door of
Apartment 14. People, there’s a reason that door is locked with four padlocks
and painted shut with half a dozen coats of latex paint. What’s inside that
“apartment” is a real shocker.
As you
all know, I’m a huge fan of horror and no fan of romance. So of course I was
delighted to find that there is no romance in this mind-boggling story, but
also to my chagrin, very little horror. Admittedly, horror is what I expected,
but I must confess, Fourteen hooked
me right from the start with its entirely different and refreshingly new level
of freakiness which I haven’t come across in any other book or movie. The plot
is built on astounding amounts of mystery which keeps you guessing right up
until the end. Don’t think ghosts or poltergeists or things that go bump in the
night. It’s nothing like that. It’s WAY more fascinating, complicated and
intriguing than that. Think more in the lines of...how shall I put it...alien
technology, abandoned mines, Victorian-era super computers, and tons of weird
discoveries. All that doesn’t even begin to describe what this book is about.
It’s an apartment building right out of an old-time sci-fi movie. That’s the
best I can do to describe it, folks. It’s fascinating, insanely exciting,
freaky, and all the synonyms of strange.
Once
you discover who the key characters are and which ones are the secondary
characters, you might find you’re already feeling invested in all of them. The
characters virtually jump off the page and effortlessly draw you into their
freaky world. There isn’t one character I liked more than the other. Even the
religious zealot freaked me out good and well. The dialogue is simply
magnificent, and the writing is old-school Dean Koontz with the plot being pure
Richard Laymon. It was hard to put this book down every time one of life’s
pesky little demands got in the way. Honestly, I hated being away from this
book. It’s not a quick read, therefore it took me almost a weekend to finish
it, but it was well worth every minute spent reading it. I haven’t been this
excited about a book since...I don’t know when. It’s one of those books I’ll be
talking about relentlessly to anyone willing to listen to me jabbering away.
Who
would enjoy this book? Any and all fans of classic horror, as well as lovers of
books containing any form of mystery and strange discoveries that would make
you look at apartment buildings in a whole new light.
PURCHASE LINKS
ABOUT the AUTHOR
He grew up in the
Stephen King fallout zone of Maine and--inspired by comic books, Star Wars,
and Saturday morning cartoons--started writing at the age of eight with his
first epic novel, Lizard Men From The Center of The
Earth (unreleased).
He made his first writing sale at age seventeen to a local newspaper, and at the age of nineteen he completed his quadruple-PhD studies in English literature, archaeology, quantum physics, and interpretive dance. In 2008, while surfing Hawaii's Keauwaula Beach, he thought up a viable way to maintain cold fusion that would also solve world hunger, but forgot about it when he ran into actress Yvonne Strahvorski back on the beach and she offered to buy him a drink. He was the inspiration for both the epic poem Beowulf and the motion picture Raiders of the Lost Ark, and is single-handedly responsible for repelling the Martian Invasion of 1938 that occurred in Grovers Mills, New Jersey. Eleven sonnets he wrote to impress a girl in high school were all later found and attributed to Shakespeare.
He is the writer of countless film articles, several short stories, The Junkie Quatrain, the rarely-read The Eerie Adventures of the Lycanthrope Robinson Crusoe, the poorly-named website Writer on Writing, and an as-yet-undiscovered Dead Sea Scroll.
He currently lives and writes somewhere in southern California.
There is compelling evidence that he is, in fact, the Lindbergh baby.
He made his first writing sale at age seventeen to a local newspaper, and at the age of nineteen he completed his quadruple-PhD studies in English literature, archaeology, quantum physics, and interpretive dance. In 2008, while surfing Hawaii's Keauwaula Beach, he thought up a viable way to maintain cold fusion that would also solve world hunger, but forgot about it when he ran into actress Yvonne Strahvorski back on the beach and she offered to buy him a drink. He was the inspiration for both the epic poem Beowulf and the motion picture Raiders of the Lost Ark, and is single-handedly responsible for repelling the Martian Invasion of 1938 that occurred in Grovers Mills, New Jersey. Eleven sonnets he wrote to impress a girl in high school were all later found and attributed to Shakespeare.
He is the writer of countless film articles, several short stories, The Junkie Quatrain, the rarely-read The Eerie Adventures of the Lycanthrope Robinson Crusoe, the poorly-named website Writer on Writing, and an as-yet-undiscovered Dead Sea Scroll.
He currently lives and writes somewhere in southern California.
There is compelling evidence that he is, in fact, the Lindbergh baby.
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