Night Things

By Thomas F. Monteleone

One would not expect the residents of Conora, NM, to be disturbed when a construction crew unearthed a Native American burial ground; after all, the sheriff, the newspaperman, the shopkeeper, and the community had their own lives to think about. Sometimes a bulldozer does more than move the earth ... it opens a wound. Conora had no way to prepare for the ancient terror that was unloosed upon it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bob Booth
• Release date: Jan 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452468273

Thomas F. Monteleone

Thomas F. Monteleone, born in 1946, is an American science fiction and horror fiction author. Monteleone has been a professional writer since 1972, and 4-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award. He has published more than 100 short stories in numerous magazines and anthologies. His stories have been nominated for numerous awards, and have appeared in many of the best-of-the-year compilations. His notorious column of opinion and entertainment, "The Mothers And Fathers Italian Association," currently appears in Cemetery Dance magazine. He is the editor of seven anthologies, including the highly acclaimed Borderlands series edited with his wife, Elizabeth, of which, Borderlands 5, won a Bram Stoker Award in 2003. They conduct a “boot-camp” for writers at Seton Hall University. He has also written The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing a Novel. Monteleone also writes for the stage and television, having scripts produced for American Playhouse (which won him the Bronze Award at the International TV and Film Festival of New York and the Gabriel Award), George Romero's Tales from the Darkside, and a series on Fox TV entitled Night Visions.

Reviews for Night Things

[nonooe_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I recalled reading a short story when I was young, in which a boy found an unusual Native American artifact buried at a construction site, took it home, then faced the unexpected horror that emerged from its confines after he hid it in the corner of his family's basement. It turns out this story was either an excerpt or a generative seed from "Night Things," an ignoble horror novel from the 80's that does few things successfully; the excerpt clearly provided the most entertaining portion of the novel. Monteleone's attempt to elude predictability by introducing victim characters did little more than make the story's central characters appear pale and underdeveloped. The ancillary characters who populate the city provide most of the story's flavor, but they're few and far between arriving late in the novel and not staying around long enough to matter. Some poorly handled plot lines, such as the blackmailer whose plot line (conveniently) never materialized beyond its inception, generated frayed edges throughout the story, their goal of providing varied shades of excitement turned out to be pallid and unfulfilled. Even the story's monsters, which somehow reminded me of the creatures in the movie "Tremors," started out as ossified, lightning-quick raptor skulls who eventually slowing to become snipe/meat grinder hybrids, pausing in mid-air to await their shotgun blasts. I may have appreciated this novel more in its natural habitat (a.k.a. 1980) before thousands of of similar novels stampeded the shelves of Walden Books and B. Dalton, but I doubt I would've appreciated it much more than I do now.