Nicholson, Scott: The Skull Ring

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Julia Stone moved from Memphis to a small town in North Carolina four months before Scott Nicholson's The Skull Ring opens: a quieter atmosphere, a less stressful job, a new therapist. Dr. Forrest has been helping Julia deal with her panic attacks, the black fear that greets her when she comes home to an empty house, the paranoid delusions. Everyone she passes on the street, everyone who comes to her door, could be one of them, the hooded bad men--the "creeps"--who tried to kill her as a child, who have been haunting her since, rearranging knick knacks in her absence, making her electronics malfunction. Or not. Granted the nightmare was real when she was four years old, but after that it's all been in her head...or so she has to keep reminding herself. No one really came in through the window while she was out: she must have forgotten to close it....

Much of The Skull Rings plays out in Julia's mind as she assesses her fears, trying to hold on to reality when the bad things going on around her seem too real to dismiss as delusions. She's torn in one direction by her therapist, but a smothering fiancé back home in Memphis is dismissive of her attempts to deal with the past by confronting it. And then there is Walter the handyman, who may be a human manifestation of infernal evil, or may just have shown up to check her windows. One never knows in Julia's world.

I had a few small quibbles with Nicholson's book. Some background information on Satanism at about the halfway point slows down the narrative, and there's a fair amount of Julia's contemplation to wade through--not only her wondering if she's crazy, but also her reflections on God and Satan. Julia also has a conversation with her neighbor early on that seems disjointed, almost as if a few lines have been mistakenly omitted from the narrative. But on the whole The Skull Ring is a good, tense read. It certainly starts out with a bang. And it's riddled with nice phrasing you'll want to pause to appreciate.

Comments

[Simon]

1.

This does look like an interesting read - I admit to not liking books that get bogged down with details sometimes - so I'm on the fence on whether to get this - but thanks for the review...