Clive Menard is just an ordinary guy living an ordinary life.
But when a talking spider crawls inside his head, things get a lot less ordinary…and people start dying.
Could an itsy-bitsy arachnid be behind the killing spree terrorizing Clive’s community?
To evade a sharp detective and find a murderer among friends, Clive must shake the cobwebs loose and piece together the puzzle of his life, all without falling prey to a dark force beyond his comprehension.
A genre-twisting dark comedy, What Hides Within is an EPIC Finalist and Independent eBook Award Runner-Up for Best Horror.
“I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes horror. It will make you cringe. It will make you shudder. It will make you want to take a shower. But you won't be able to put it down.” - Thomas W. Everson, author of The Rain Experience Trilogy
What Hides Within by Jason Parent
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Review: WHAT HIDES BENEATH by Jason Parent
Know that I enjoy feckless protagonists--I really do. But there's a gulf between ordinary individuals who are dogged by inexplicable bad luck and constraining circumstances, and those who are just not worth the paper they're printed on. {Sigh.}
Starting out, I was really prepared to give feckless Clive the benefit of the doubt. Here's a guy abused by a surgeon, who operated on his frontal lobe for no reason, messed up the operation, and plans to buy the patient off with tickets to a baseball game? Please! This is flying in big-time megabucks personal injury lawsuit land here!
I do feel sympathetic for that....but Clive is a malingerer, absent drive, motivation, or ambition; and early on, he dives headlong (quite literally) into REALLY SERIOUS DANGER, out of a dearth of good common sense. Head plant territory. I wouldn't wish Clive' s tragic difficulty on anyone {except maybe serial killers or tinpot dictators}, but still, I often found myself wishing I could drum up more sympathy for this character and a little less HO-hum doldrums, will this guy get a clue?
Meanwhile, while protagonist Clive {anti-protagonist?} suffers through his may-or-may-not-be life-threatening situation, an egotistic, narcissistic, amateur bomb-maker decides to show the world his stuff (or at least his corner of Massachusetts), and someone has killed a child and abandoned the corpse, traumatizing her family and the young boy who found her. That kind of puts feckless Clive' s biological/mental predicament into perspective, or does it? Seemingly, Clive has a biological parasite which medical attention should readily cure. But when you're Clive, good fortune comes your way about as often as the boy with the permanent cloud over his head in the 1960's comic strip--never.
In a prior life, Jason spent most of his time in front of a judge . . . as a civil litigator. When he finally tired of Latin phrases no one knew how to pronounce and explaining to people that real lawsuits are not started, tried and finalized within the 60-minute timeframe they see on TV (it's harassing the witness; no one throws vicious woodland creatures at them), he traded in his cheap suits for flip flops and designer stubble. The flops got repossessed the next day, and he's back in the legal field . . . sorta. But that's another story.
When he's not working, Jason likes to kayak, catch a movie, travel any place that will let him enter, and play just about any sport (except that ball tied to the pole thing where you basically just whack the ball until it twists in a knot or takes somebody's head off - he misses the appeal). And read and write, of course. He does that too sometimes.
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