Its been a decade since the Delongpre family vanished near Bayou Rabineaux, and still no one can explain the events of that dark and sweltering night. No one except Niquette Delongpre, the survivor who ran away from the mangled stretch of guardrail on Highway 22 where the impossible occurred and kept on running. Who left behind her best friends, Ben and Anthem, to save them from her newfound capacity for destruction and who alone knows the source of her very bizarre and very deadly abilities, an isolated strip of swampland called Elysium. An accomplished surgeon, Niquettes father dreamed of transforming the dense acreage surrounded by murky waters into a palatial compound befitting the name his beloved wife gave to it, Elysium, the final resting place for the heroic and virtuous. Then, ten years ago construction workers dug into a long hidden well, one that snaked down into the deep, black waters of the Louisiana swamp and stirred something that had been there for centuries a microscopic parasite that perverts the mind and corrupts the body. Niquette is living proof that things done cant be undone. Nothing will put her family back together again, and nothing can save her. But as Niquette, Ben, and Anthem uncover the truth of a devastating parasite that has the potential to alter the future of humankind, Niquette grasps the most chilling truths of all, someone else has been infected too, and unlike her this man is not content to live in the shadows. He is intent to use his newfound powers for one reason only, revenge.
The Heavens Rise was my first Christopher Rice book, but it certainly won't be my last. In a style reminiscent of Stephen King, Rice takes us to a broken New Orleans, still struggling to get on it's feet years after Katrina. Ben and Anthem are two friends that have never come to grips with the loss of their best friend, and in Anthem's case the love of his life, Nikki. There were a lot of questions surrounding the disappearance of her and her parents.
There was a lot of creepy moments, made even more so by the way Rice makes his characters so real, and their emotions true to the moment. You know from reading the blurb that Nikki isn't dead, but what happened to her remains a mystery until near the very end. The supernatural element in this story is less a factor than the human element; what two very different people do when given the same ... gift? I use that term loosely, as this is not something I think I would want to be "gifted" with. Just the thought of it ... *shudders* even weeks after reading The Heavens Rise I still get a physical reaction when I think about certain parts.
And Marshall ... here we have a terrifying psychotic bad guy that puts many current bad guys to shame. He is so ... real, so plausible that it makes me not want to leave my house ever again. He is a sick, sadistic, bastard, that I wished nothing but pain and death on from the moment we really got to know him, in the pool at Elysium.
I did feel that the side effects of the "gift", when we learn about them near the end, a bit cheesy, and I did roll my eyes once or twice, but it still created an interesting twist during the final chapters. As well as what happened to Nikki after he disappearance, that whole thing took me out of the story some, but that was more because I was so wrapped up in Ben, Anthem, and Marshall's stories that I wanted to get back to them, to see what was happening to them.
All in all, definitely a good creepy read just in time for Halloween.
Reading updates
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Started reading
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22 September, 2013:
Finished reading
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22 September, 2013:
Reviewed