Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Quicksand House by Carlton Mellick III

(pb; 2013)

From the back cover

"Tick and Polly have never met their parents before. They live in the same house with them, they dream about them every night, they share the same flesh and blood, yet for some reason their parents have never found the time to visit them even once since they were born. Living in a dark corner of their parents' vast crumbling mansion, the children long for the day when they will finally be held in their mother's loving arms for the first time... But that day seems to never come. They worry their parents have long since forgotten about them.

"When the machines that provide them with food and water stop functioning, the children are forced to venture out of the nursery to find their parents on their own. But the rest of the house is much larger and stranger than they ever could have imagined. The maze-like hallways are dark and seem to go on forever, deranged creatures lurk in every shadow, and the bodies of long-dead children litter the abandoned storerooms. Every minute out of the nursery is a constant battle for survival. And the deeper into the house they go, the more they must unravel the mysteries surrounding their past and the world they've grown up in, if they ever hope to meet the parents they've always longed to see."



Review

Quicksand is an excellent mixture of mystery, science fiction, horror and bizarro fiction, one worth owning. What Mellick has that so many other bizarro authors lack is tight editing, good characterization (which lends itself to a strange sense warmth, bond between key characters) and a willingness to experiment with genre expectations. This is one of my favorite reads of 2017.

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