Little Heaven

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Micah Shughrue is a more simple, cold, and calculated man more than willing to get his hands dirty but not without a conscience.

The religious retreat seems like any other such encampment created by a bunch of Bible-thumpers led by a charismatic Reverend Jones-type huckster; mostly decent if naive and easily led folks seeking an escape from the sins of Babylon (in this case, appropriately, San Francisco, the city from which they fled). But regretfully, I found it really hard to care about anyone in this book, which also likely dampened my enthusiasm for the story.Rating 7: This book scared the living daylights out of me, but the ending was a bit too nihilistic for my tastes. It’s an odd feeling when you seem to be out of sync with other reviews isn’t it – I had a similar feeling with Gilded Cage. Stirrings in the woods and over the treetops—the brooding shape of a monolith known as the Black Rock casts its terrible pall. but this one is characterized by an old school horror that is too old school for my tastes, edging into that lovecraft territory i just do not dig. Long back story (which is really extended), the three are hired to go to a religious camp/cult deep in the New Mexico mountains to check on a kid taken there with his father (the person hiring them is his aunt).

Even early on, though, Cutter shows that he’s doing something different with the story, hinting that our characters didn’t just gain nightmares and trauma from that 1960’s encounter; they’ve gained something awful, some Faustian deal that’s hurt them more than helped. Ebenezer Elkins, “The Englishman,” is delightfully cordial, clever as a whip, and unyieldingly deadly. About 80% into it, completely numbed, I was flipping pages past brilliant horror scenes just to get to the end. She did not want him to collapse - he might fall down the steep slope and break his loathsome neck, robbing her of the opportunity to slit it later on and dance a happy jig in his fountaining blood like a child skipping around an opened fire hydrant. The pace did pick up a bit but there were still random thoughts/remembrances the characters have that continued to make it drag to me.

Between the physical description of Amos, the leader of this group, the fact that they started in San Francisco, and some of the rituals and proclivities they embark on, Cutter has definitely written a ‘love letter’ of sorts to the group that’s best known for drinking the Kool Aid.

I do recommend this one if you are a Cutter fan, however if you haven't read anything by him before then I suggest reading The Troop or The Deep first. While Little Heaven was extremely dark and disturbing (two of my favourite qualities in a horror novel), it was also very long-winded. I liked it quite a bit, and I suspect if I hadn't read several of King's biggest and best first I would have absolutely loved this book. Many months after Little Heaven is settled a young woman named Ellen hires a trio of mercenaries to take her there.If you want something that will give you a legitimate scare- then make sure to mark your calendars for January 10, 2017. The image that Cutter sets forward never leaves us and give us the kind of promise that he delivered in his first books. Everyone seems to love it but I had issues with the world building that don’t seem to have bothered others. There is a certain primal quality to forests—a sense that they’re entities unto themselves: ancient, maze-like constructions, ubiquitous as they are impenetrable, older than living memory, full of secrets. At the beginning of the novel, set in the 1980s, we meet each of the mercenaries and learn a little bit about their backstory.