Mister Lullaby
A Novel
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
From J. H. Markert, the author Peter Farris calls the "clear heir to Stephen King," Mister Lullaby brings our darkest dreams and nightmares to life.
In the vein of T. Kingfisher and Christopher Golden, the boundary protecting our world from the monsters on the other side is weakening—and Mister Lullaby is about to break through.
The small town of Harrod’s Reach has seen its fair share of the macabre, especially inside the decrepit old train tunnel around which the town was built. After a young boy, Sully Dupree, is injured in the abandoned tunnel and left in a coma, the townspeople are determined to wall it up. Deputy sheriff Beth Gardner is reluctant to buy into the superstitions until she finds two corpses at the tunnel’s entrance, each left with strange calling cards inscribed with old lullabies. Soon after, Sully Dupree briefly awakens from his coma.
Before falling back into his slumber, Sully manages to give his older brother a message. Sully's mind, since the accident, has been imprisoned on the other side of the tunnel in Lalaland, a grotesque and unfamiliar world inhabited by evil mythical creatures of sleep. Sully is trapped there with hundreds of other coma patients, all desperately fighting to keep the evils of the dream world from escaping into the waking world.
Elsewhere, a man troubled by his painful youth has for years been hearing a voice in his head he calls Mr. Lullaby, and he has finally started to act on what that voice is telling him—to kill any coma patient he can find, quickly.
Something is waking up in the tunnel—something is trying to get through. And Mr. Lullaby is coming.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A sleepy Nebraska backwater serves as the unlikely ground zero for the eruption of a dimension's worth of otherworldly nightmares in this high-octane supernatural thriller from Markert (The Nightmare Man). Since the mid-19th century, Harrod's Reach has been plagued by a legacy of disappearances and deaths related to its unused local train tunnel. One of the tunnel's last victims, before the town bricked it up, was Sully Dupree, who, now age eight, has been comatose for years following an ill-fated experience inside it. But Sully's condition, lamented in the waking world as tragic, gives him strength in Lalaland, a realm of dreams where he and other "Seers" like him serve as gatekeepers holding at bay an incursion of nightmares into the waking world. Leading this dastardly charge is Mister Lullaby, a malignant entity who, through serial killer Teddy Lomax and his gang of malevolent "mare" infiltrators, hastens to Harrod's Reach for a climactic showdown with Sully's brother, Gideon, and the town's united citizens. Markert evokes the style and substance of works from horror's golden years with his depiction of a small town under siege by infernal forces and a large cast of well-developed characters. Not all of the elements add up, but horror fans will enjoy the rapid-fire pacing and pyrotechnic finale.
