Mannheim Rex
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
From the internationally bestselling novelist Rob Pobi comes Mannheim Rex, an homage to the blockbuster Jaws and the classic American novel Moby Dick.
After the sudden death of his wife, famous horror writer Gavin Corlie retreats from New York City to a secluded house on Lake Caldasac. But his new life in the country is far from idyllic, and when a thirteen-year-old wheelchair-bound boy named Finn Horn nearly drowns in the lake, Gavin discovers a startling secret: people in this peaceful lakeside community keep vanishing. Is the corrupt, drug-fuelled town sheriff to blame? Or is Finn’s account of a lake-dwelling leviathan more than a near-death hallucination?
Racing against time and Mother Nature, Gavin and Finn embark on a quest to catch a nightmare beast. It’s survival of the fittest, and it isn’t long before the pair realizes that they might be out of their depth…and that the hunters may have become the hunted.
An homage to Peter Benchley’s Jaws and the classic Moby Dick, Mannheim Rex is an unsettling thriller that switches seamlessly between heartwarming friendship and heart-stopping action.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pobi invokes American classics Jaws and Moby-Dick in this cinematic, old-school suspense tale worthy of King and Koontz. Tension builds slowly, as renowned horror novelist Gavin Corlie flees New York City after a drunk driver kills his wife, settling into a long-abandoned lake house on the edge of New Mannheim, an upstate New York town that time forgot. Corlie soon befriends Finn Horn, a 13-year-old handicapped boy dying from cancer who spends his days fishing on Lake Caldasac, site of several bizarre missing-person reports that the majority of local residents either are not aware of or choose to ignore. But Finn thinks he's solved the mystery when he experiences a close encounter with a sea monster in the lake and enlists Corlie to help him capture and kill it. "efore I die, I'm going to do something important. Something big. BIG!" he proclaims. Some of the gruesomeness from Pobi's 2012 psychological thriller Bloodman seeps in, particularly the death-in-the-water scenes. A few gratuitous scenes only serve to lengthen the book or overplay the nastiness of characters like Xavier Pope the county's scumbag sheriff who literally gets away with murder. However, Pobi's full-bodied characters, keen sense of place, and ear for realistic dialogue make for an engaging read.
