The Poker Club

Science Fiction Chronicle

Frightening..and scary because it's so plausible, and because Gorman knows exactly how to keep the reader on the edge of the seat.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Not all short story ideas can be stretched comfortably to fit the frame of a novel, as this tenuous expansion of Gorman's short suspense powerhouse "Out There in the Darkness" proves. The basic plot of the tale (first published as a chapbook in 1996) remains the same: four respectable suburban men learn deadly lessons in personal honesty and civic responsibility when they try covering up their accidental killing of a burglar and outwitting his vengeful accomplice. Gorman (The Day the Music Died) uses the extra elbow room to develop distinct personalities for his protagonists and evoke paranoid fears as their hitherto secure world of middle-class values grows increasingly precarious. Better still, he fleshes out the anonymous and implacable accomplice who stalks them, describing this figure as a suburban nightmare incarnate of "evil, modern evil, urban evil, of eyes that watched in the darkness, watched little children and good mothers, of eyes that coveted money and flesh and life itself." But the novel's first-person narrative limits options for sustaining the pace and pitch of the thrills. Aaron Tyler, the lawyer in whose house the killing occurred, gives muted second-hand accounts of how the experience unhinges the lives of his three friends. His own ordeal of menacing car chases, 4 a.m. phone calls and threats to his family quickly becomes repetitive and predictable. Gorman's lean, resilient prose is tough enough to hold the novel's weak patches and contrived finale together, but it can't disguise the overall thinness. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.