If you've been reading horror since the mid-eighties you probably remember Rick Hautala. He skyrocket to the million copy bestseller mark with his third novel, NIGHT STONE, the first paperback horror novel with a holographic cover. Though he wrote a string of spooky books in the late eighties and early nineties he has been absent from the shelves for a while.
That's going to change. Leisure is reprinting THE MOUNTAIN KING and Berkley is giving a big push to THE WHITE ROOM. However, it seems that Berkley has decided to use a pseudonym, so that novel will be published with the author listed as A.J. Matthews.
Oh I definitley remember Hautala. He was never really a favorite of mine, but he always delivered a good solid story with believable characters you could identify with. I read several of his books, but they all seem to run together in my mind. The Mountain King is supposedly his masterpiece to date. I never got the Cemetery Dance edition, but I'll pick up the Leisure paperback when it's available and see for myself.
My fav Hautala novel was his first & IMO his best, MOONDEATH.It was an effective & very memorable werewolf tale set in a small New Hampshire town.I'd always thought that in the right hands it could make a helluva decent film infact.His follow up MOONBOG was also pretty good.After that he just seemed to ,for lack of a better term,"over write" everything.Things that seemingly could have been handled in a paragraph or 2 just went on & on,page after page.I continued to read his work for a few years,probably his next 5 or 6 novels in fact,but they increasingly became a chore to get through.His ideas were good,but the tales themselves just dragged.Eventually I just stopped buying his work.
THE MOUNTAIN KING sounds very interesting though & I'm inclined to give him another shot with this one.
-Jim
The only thing I ever tried to read by Hautala was Bedbugs. For some reason, I just couldn't get into these stories. Perhaps it was my frame of mind at the time so I'll give it another try.
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