From Publishers Weekly

Clegg (You Come When I Call You [Forecasts, Mar. 6]) turns the screws dexterously in this sleek, multifaceted suspense story, twisting an ill-fated love triangle into a framework for violent tragedy. Owen Crites, teenage son of a gardener to the rich on Outerbridge Island, pines for debutante Jenna Montgomery, a childhood sweetheart who comes to stay each summer with her parents. Devastated when Jenna arrives the summer of their 18th year with preppie tennis star Jimmy McTeague in tow, Owen schemes to win her back by seducing his sexually conflicted rival--and then presenting himself as the waylaid victim to Jenna. Ensuing events, though surprising, flow ineluctably from the behavior of Clegg's deftly sketched characters. Owen is intriguingly complex: sympathetic in his insecurity and social na vet , but creepy in his obsessive idolatry of a primitive god appropriated from pulp horror stories. Jimmy, Jenna and even Jenna's love-starved mother, whose exchanges with Owen smolder with sexual tension, all have private moments in which they reveal unspoken, potentially volatile discontent with their lives. Clegg brings them together in a vacation paradise saturated in alcohol, entitlement and hypocrisy, from which a fall seems inevitable. With uncommon finesse, he beguiles the reader into believing that the destinies carved for his doomed modern souls by social caste and economic privilege differ little from the inescapable fates ordained in classic tragedy. (June) FYI: Clegg won an International Horror Guild Award for his short-fiction collection The Nightmare Chronicles at the World Horror Convention in May.

Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

Clegg (You Come When I Call You [Forecasts, Mar. 6]) turns the screws dexterously in this sleek, multifaceted suspense story, twisting an ill-fated love triangle into a framework for violent tragedy. Owen Crites, teenage son of a gardener to the rich on Outerbridge Island, pines for debutante Jenna Montgomery, a childhood sweetheart who comes to stay each summer with her parents. Devastated when Jenna arrives the summer of their 18th year with preppie tennis star Jimmy McTeague in tow, Owen schemes to win her back by seducing his sexually conflicted rivalAand then presenting himself as the waylaid victim to Jenna. Ensuing events, though surprising, flow ineluctably from the behavior of Clegg's deftly sketched characters. Owen is intriguingly complex: sympathetic in his insecurity and social na?vet?, but creepy in his obsessive idolatry of a primitive god appropriated from pulp horror stories. Jimmy, Jenna and even Jenna's love-starved mother, whose exchanges with Owen smolder with sexual tension, all have private moments in which they reveal unspoken, potentially volatile discontent with their lives. Clegg brings them together in a vacation paradise saturated in alcohol, entitlement and hypocrisy, from which a fall seems inevitable. With uncommon finesse, he beguiles the reader into believing that the destinies carved for his doomed modern souls by social caste and economic privilege differ little from the inescapable fates ordained in classic tragedy. (June) FYI: Clegg won an International Horror Guild Award for his short-fiction collection The Nightmare Chronicles at the World Horror Convention in May.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Amazon.com Review

Horror fiction need not necessarily have original ideas--most of its ideas are as old as the hills--but it's a treat when a writer like Douglas Clegg comes along, with the ability to look at the old ideas in new ways. In The Children's Hour Clegg reinvented the vampire legend. In The Halloween Man Clegg reinvents devil worship.

The plot of this novel is so complex and multifaceted, it's not easy to summarize, but it boils down to two narratives about two points in time. The protagonist, Stony Crawford, is a 15-year-old man (not a boy) in love with a dark-haired beauty named Lourdes Maria. Their surprisingly deep romance unfolds against the backdrop of a peculiar small town on the rugged coast of Connecticut. After a 12-year absence, Stony returns to this town bringing with him a young boy whom he kidnapped from a religious compound in Texas. Thanks to Clegg's skillful interlacing of the two narratives, when the life of 15-year-old Stony climaxes, so does that of 27-year-old Stony. The crux of both stories is a powerful being of "divine evil" and "Azriel Light"--perhaps a demon, perhaps simply a creature like any other.

Clegg's characters are well realized and fascinating, and the story is richly steeped in history. The Halloween Man is a stunning horror novel, written with a degree of conviction that is rare these days. --Fiona Webster

Review

"Clegg gets high marks on the terror scale..."(The Daily News (New York)) -- This is a required answer. Please enter something.

"Douglas Clegg is one of horror's most captivating voices..." -- BookLovers

"Every bit as good as the best works of Stephen King, Peter Straub, or Dan Simmons..." -- Hellnotes: The Newsletter for the Horror Professional

"Packed with vivid imagery; a broadly-scoped but fast-paced plot; powerful, evocative writing; superb characterizations; and facile intelligence, The Halloween Man is more than its blurbage can ever convey..." -- DarkEcho

From Publishers Weekly

Alongside the dominant stream of horror fiction that, at whatever level of artistic achievement, relies on shock and gore, runs a quieter stream that relies on atmosphere and inference for its unsettling effects (think Machen, Blackwood, sometimes Ramsey Campbell). Clegg (The Infinite; Naomi) has added a superior new title to this latter tradition, with a psychologically astute and genuinely shivery story of a young man who returns to his ancestral home on a remote island off Massachusetts. Nemo Raglan, a failed novelist, is back at Hawthorn, on Burnley Island, because his father, Gordie, has been found slaughtered in the family's smokehouse. Also at Hawthorn are Nemo's errant younger brother, Bruno, and their sister, Brooke, a high-strung artist who'd been living with Dad; the siblings' mother had disappeared from the family when they were children. The killer has, weirdly, left no traces and thus no clues; but then much about Hawthorn and the siblings is weird, particularly the game they played as children, a risky form of mind-projection taught them by their father, who used it as a POW, whereby they were able to explore worlds known and unknown. As brothers and sister get reacquainted and ponder the murder, the air grows tense but also dark. Nemo senses an unseen presence; is the house haunted? Clegg delves deep and precisely into the familial ties that bind but also sunder even as he celebrates the magical isolation of a New England island so adrift from the mainland as to be its own planet. Suspenseful and relentlessly spooky, told in economical prose yet peopled by characters as fully realized as one's own blood kin, this is at once the most artful and most mainstream tale yet from one of horror's brightest lights.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The brutal murder of his father brings Nemo Raglan back to the New England home of his childhood, where he joins his brother and sister in unraveling the mystery of their father's death and solving the frightening puzzle somehow connected to an old childhood game. The author of The Nightmare Chronicles constructs an eerie psychological tale of supernatural horror that builds suspense gradually as the characters slowly peel back the layers of their past and face the terrors of their shared childhood. Clegg approaches horror with a stark and vital simplicity that is utterly convincing. Fans of Stephen King and Dean Koontz will appreciate this atmospheric gem. For most horror collections.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly

Clegg's (The Halloween Man, etc.) collection of 13 tales takes risks and is full of passions that sometimes burst forth violently. But his skill at elucidating the psychological lives of his characters in precise, revealing prose makes these emotions more disturbing than the violence itself. In the best selection, "The Rendering Man," a girl's lifelong obsession with the creepy local who turns dead animals into consumer goods discloses her own festering psychopathology. Subtle seeding of the tale with images of death and transfiguration gives its climax a haunting and visceral inevitability. The narrative device into which the stories are pluggedAeach is presented as a nightmare inflicted by a monstrous boy upon his kidnappersAis flimsy but succeeds in calling attention to several recurring themes: the predatory nature of human sexuality ("Chosen"; "The Night Before Alec Got Married") and "the secret rituals that all families have that would seem insane to outsiders" ("Damned If You Do"; "The Hurting Season"). Clegg's use of innovative metaphors catapults each story beyond a landscape crowded with the horror genre's usual monsters and madmen into a territory he alone can claim. (Sept.) FYI: Clegg is the author of Naomi, the much-touted e-novel in progress.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"...Without doubt, [The Nightmare Chronicles is] one of the best collections of the year." -- HorrorOnline

From Publishers Weekly

Clegg gained attention last year for Naomi, his serialized horror novel that, arguably, was the first major work of fiction to originate in cyberspace. Genre cognoscenti, however, know him also for several acclaimed earlier novels, including The Halloween Man. Clegg's new book, which marks his first hardcover publication under his own name, is as powerful literarily and morally as anything he's written. Densely textured in plot, language and character, it tells of the 1980 destruction of the body and soul of a small desert town in California and of the resolution, 20 years later, of that supernaturally created holocaust; past and present mingle throughout, as if in a dream. The act of dreaming is a primary motif in the book, for the agent of destruction, Lamia ("lamia was fluid from steamy swamps... always feeding from the dying... until a depraved animal walking on two feet learned to pass lamia, to cultivate and worship lamia, to call it god, then demon...."), who, manifested in the body of a beautiful teenage girl, bends the reality of those upon whom she feeds, psychically and physically. Set amid the town's squalor of trailer parks, organized dogfights and fevered relationships of those with no escape, and also in the hard streets of Manhattan, a drug den in Los Angeles and elsewhere, the novel reads like a nightmare on paper as Clegg traces the fates of several of Lamia's victims. His imagery is intense, horrific, sexually violent--patricide, incestuous rape and cannibalism are among the crimes he envisions--but he paints with a poet's hand. Despite its monstrousness, his vision tenders a kind of hope; Lamia's destructive powers are balanced by another's force for healing, and, at novel's end, one victim recognizes the power of "grace." This is horror at its finest. (Mar.) FYI: Also in March but after Cemetery Dance's publication of this novel, Dorchester/Leisure will release a mass market edition ($5.99 400p ISBN 0-8439-4695-4).
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Es heißt, Aleric sei der Sohn einer Hexe. Doch nicht einmal das kann ihn retten, als sein Verhältnis mit der Tochter eines Barons ans Licht kommt. Aleric muss fliehen und gelangt dabei bis ins Heilige Land, wo er zu einem mächtigen Krieger heranreift - aber auch zu einem Mann ohne Ehre und Gewissen. Schließlich treibt das Schicksal Aleric in die Ruinen einer uralten Stadt, wo er auf Pythia trifft. In ihrer Leidenschaft findet er die Liebe - und mit ihrem blutigen Kuss sein Schicksal ....      

Nada parece presagiar el verdadero y oscuro sino de Aleric el Halconero. Su vida transcurre entre la miseria extrema y la brutalidad del mundo. Hijo de una mujer que se prostituye para mantener a su extensa prole y de padre desconocido, se cría en los bosques de la Bretaña francesa medieval y aprende a comunicarse con las grandes aves predadoras que los habitan. Gracias a ello logra entrar al servicio de un barón de la zona como halconero.

Sin embargo, Aleric sobrepasa los límites de su condición social enamorándose de la hermosa hija del señor del castillo. La ira del celoso padre cae implacable sobre él y es forzado a partir como soldado a las cruzadas. En Tierra Santa, lejos de su patria e inmerso en una guerra cruel y sin sentido, Aleric el Halconero se verá empujado por la perversa Pythia hacia el verdadero destino para el cual nació.

The stunning debut novel from bestselling author Bill Clegg is a magnificently powerful story about a circle of people who find solace in the least likely of places as they cope with a horrific tragedy.

On the eve of her daughter’s wedding, June Reid’s life is completely devastated when a shocking disaster takes the lives of her daughter, her daughter’s fiancé, her ex-husband, and her boyfriend, Luke — her entire family, all gone in a moment. And June is the only survivor.

Alone and directionless, June drives across the country, away from her small Connecticut town. In her wake, a community emerges, weaving a beautiful and surprising web of connections through shared heartbreak.

From the couple running a motel on the Pacific Ocean where June eventually settles into a quiet half-life, to the wedding’s caterer whose bill has been forgotten, to Luke’s mother, the shattered outcast of the town — everyone touched by the tragedy is changed as truths about their near and far histories finally come to light.

Elegant and heartrending, and one of the most accomplished fiction debuts of the year, is an absorbing, unforgettable tale that reveals humanity at its best through forgiveness and hope. At its core is a celebration of family — the ones we are born with and the ones we create.

Bill Clegg had a thriving business as a literary agent, representing a growing list of writers. He had a supportive partner, trusting colleagues, and loving friends when he walked away from his world and embarked on a two-month crack binge. He had been released from rehab nine months earlier, and his relapse would cost him his home, his money, his career, and very nearly his life.

What is it that leads an exceptional young mind to want to disappear? Clegg makes stunningly clear the attraction of the drug that had him in its thrall, capturing in scene after scene the drama, tension, and paranoiac nightmare of a secret life-and the exhilarating bliss that came again and again until it was eclipsed almost entirely by doom. PORTRAIT OF AN ADDICT AS A YOUNG MAN is an utterly compelling narrative-lyrical, irresistible, harsh, and honest-from which you simply cannot look away.