You Come When I Call You
by Douglas Clegg

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Book Reviews of You Come When I Call You

Book Review: A Great Horror Novel
Summary: 5 Stars

I've been a big fan of the horror genre since I read Stephen King's Pet Sematary when I was eleven. A list of my favorite authors would have to include King, Peter Straub, Ray Bradbury, Robert R. McCammon, Clive Barker, Dan Simmons, T.E.D. Klein, Dean Koontz, Joe R. Lansdale, and now Douglas Clegg.

I decided to read You Come When I Call You because it had just been published, and because I had read reviews comparing it to Straub's Ghost Story and King's It (two of my all-time favorites). Having now read the book in question, I'd have to say that it's not as good as either of those, but it's still a hell of a good read, and still worthy of five stars. (Another book that I was reminded of while reading it was Stinger by Robert R. McCammon).

In You Come When I Call You, Clegg tells a story of childhood friends reunited in the present by a shared experience in their past--an experience so visceral and unrelenting that it continues to live on in their hearts and in their tormented waking dreams. The novel is divided into five parts which alternate between the story of Peter, Alison, and Charlie's last summer of childhood in the desert town of Palmetto, California, 1980 and the fallout of that summer in the present day. This technique of alternating between the characters as adults and children is probably the novel's strongest similarity to It. It's a great narrative device, because I found that reading about the characters' pasts made me want to know more about their futures and vice versa. One of Clegg's themes in the book is how good and evil aren't opposite forces, but rather parts of the same whole. He seems to be saying the same about the past and the present.

The novel is also similar in its structure to Bram Stoker's Dracula. The narrative is woven together from a bunch of disparate sources: journal entries, taped interviews, and third person narration. In the beginning, I found this a little distracting. I felt that I didn't know enough about the characters and had a hard time relating to them as a result. But once I was on page 60 or 70, I felt the various forms of narrative had gelled together into a cohesive whole. From that point on, I just couldn't put the book down.

The novel's similarity to Ghost Story is mainly one of plot: there's a group of friends haunted by an event they took part in in their youth, having to do with a beautiful young woman who is more than she at first appears to be. I didn't feel that Clegg's style was very similar to Straub's. It's more visceral and gut-level, and probably less elegant (though I don't mean that as a put-down). Straub is one of my favorite stylists. He's hard to beat. With Clegg, I feel the beauty of his writing is more in the momentum he develops in his story-telling, and in the ease with which he seems to do it.

My only real complaint was that I felt I didn't get enough of the charcters' childhoods. Just when I thought they were getting really interesting as characters, the novel switched back to the present and later just summarily dealt with the concluding events of the summer of 1980. I would have particularly liked to have read more of the romance between the teenaged Peter and Alison.

Still, it's a great horror novel, and I highly recommend it. A really good summer read.

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