“The Caretaker of Lorne Field” by Dave Zeltserman

The Caretaker of Lorne Field is a wonderfully weird, gritty, and pitch-dark legend, perfect for New England. Weaved in the compulsively readable narrative is a heavy dose of our current society’s meanness, unease, and ambiguity: kind of a nightmare-noir zeitgeist. The thing of it is, the reader is never safe in Dave Zeltserman’s hands. I love that. You should too.

If Stephen King had a true Noir calling and Peter Straub added contemporary horror… and Dean Koontz threw in his fine depiction of ordinary life on the edge of the unknown… then bring the specter of James M. Cain to write the narrative, you’d come close to describing the whole effect of this stunning slice for the zeitgeist wondrous novel and the writing is… pure dark bliss.

Black humor, fast pacing and a genuine affection for thoughts that go bump in the night. One of my favorite horror novels of 2010.

I became a Zeltserman fan after I read his superb noir trilogy SMALL CRIMES, PARIAH and KILLER. When I heard that he’d written a darkly funny horror (for want of a better genre definition) novel, I was curious — of course — but doubted it could top the trilogy. I was wrong. THE CARETAKER OF LORNE FIELD is a masterclass in character development, suspense and reader manipulation. Frightening, funny and poignant, it blends the cosmic horror of H. P. Lovecraft with the down-homey terror of Stephen King at his best.

CARETAKER is one of my books of the year.