Wildwood Road

by Christopher Golden

$12.00, Bantam Books, 311 pp

Christopher Golden does it to me again. He snuck up on me with another drop-dead sneaky bit of horror. This little story is about one of the nicest guys that ever existed in fiction (and certainly doesn’t exist in my reality…) Michael is totally in love with his wife, Jillian, who is also such a really sweet, nice person. (Don’t you just know something truly awful has to happen to two such unbelievably nice people in a Golden story?) Golden has a talent for putting his innocent protagonists into horrible situations that were truly none of their fault. There are a thousand horror stories about the wannabe wizard/witch/sorcerer who ‘unwittingly’ unleashes some disgustingly nasty creature on themself. And stories about some unredeemable piece of human trash who gets his/her comeuppance in an awful fashion. Or, even if the good guy is really good and innocent, he does something unbelievably stupid and puts himself or a loved one into a bad situation. But not in a Golden story – his people never do anything deserving of what happens to them. It’s like having lunch at a MacDonalds and someone you never met before decides to spend their day spraying 9mm bullets all over you and your fellow diners. You just never saw it coming…

For Michael, it started while coming home from a party with his wife. He just happened to be in the wrong place when he almost ran down a little blond-haired girl who was standing on the shoulder after midnight in the middle of nowhere. After a bizarre trip to her house, she left him with the admonition to ‘come find me.’ And now he has to. He can’t sleep or concentrate on work. And he cannot find the house again, no matter how he tries. But the worst is when the deathly, hollow women come to his house to discourage his search. And instead of hurting Michael, they take something invaluable from his beloved wife. Michael’s loving, kind wife is now a bitter, angry woman who will strike back at him in every way possible. Now, he has a bigger mission: not just to save the child but to save Jillian and his sanity.

This is such a well-plotted, and well-written story. Golden takes us with Michael every step of the way so that we are there with him. We can understand his desperation and despair that this just might be more than he can deal with. My only criticism – and it is only a matter of taste – is that they continued to be ordinary people in the end when I really wanted them to continue to be heroes and save everyone. - Catherine Book