Creepers

I’ve finished reading the first of the books I got for Christmas, David Morrell’s recent suspense novel CREEPERS. This one drew a lot of comments from various bloggers when it first came out, but I’m just now getting around to it. It’s the story of a small group of people – urban explorers, they call themselves, but they’re also known as creepers – who break into and explore abandoned buildings. In this case, the building is an old hotel in Asbury Park, New Jersey, that’s about to be demolished. And it won’t come as any surprise to the reader that the hotel contains a lot of secrets and more than a few Very Bad Things.

Morrell writes great action scenes, and the pace seldom slows down for very long in this book. There are also several major plot twists along the way. Some critics felt that Morrell threw in too many reversals of the plot, but I thought they were all fairly clued and logical and liked them just fine. But then, I’m a plot guy, and there’s a lot of plot in this book, especially considering that the action takes place over the course of only six hours.

This is only the second novel by Morrell that I’ve read, the other being LONG LOST, which, coincidentally, Ed Gorman mentioned yesterday on his blog. I liked LONG LOST, though I had one problem with the plot in it. CREEPERS, though, is excellent all around, and one of the best books I’ve read this year. (But will it make my Top Ten? I honestly don’t know because I haven’t figured it out yet, but we’ll all find out in a few days if things go as planned.)