Coffins
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
In rural Maine, a stop on the Underground Railroad is menaced by a supernatural force in this terrifying novel of pre–Civil War horror.
Davis Bentwood has nearly finished medical school when he meets an abolitionist dwarf walking across Harvard Yard. Jeb Coffin is a nonpracticing doctor, a devoted student of transcendentalism whose home life has been shaken by tragedy. The two men become friends, and Coffin invites Bentwood to rural Maine to save his family from itself. The Coffins are noted abolitionists, their home a stop on the Underground Railroad, and lately they have been menaced by a supernatural terror. The tragedies are countless: two brothers killed, a father driven mad, and a baby frozen solid in its crib.
At first Bentwood cannot bring himself to acknowledge the impossible horrors that have cursed this family. But he will not survive his sojourn in Maine unless he can open his mind to the possibility that something evil is waiting in the dark.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Best known for his young adult novels (Freak the Mighty), Philbrick swerves from his usual path with this adults-only supernatural horror show, certainly not for the squeamish or faint of heart. Just before the Civil War, young doctor Davis Bentwood befriends a dwarf named Jebediah Coffin. Jeb may be small of stature, but he has the brains and energy of 10 men. Davis is a doctor who does not practice; he is a lazy and self-centered young man who dabbles in science and the new fad of transcendentalism. When an urgent telegram summons Davis to the Coffin family home in Maine, he is unexpectedly thrown into a shocking world of curses, madness, malevolence, hauntings and violent death. Jeb's twin brothers have been cut to pieces in a sawmill, and his baby nephew is found frozen to death in a stifling hot nursery. Jeb's father, Capt. Cash Coffin, raves like a lunatic, and the entire family is paralyzed with fear and grief. Davis learns that the wealthy Coffins are proud abolitionists, even using their home as part of the Underground Railroad to help escaping slaves reach safety in Canada. He also learns of a terrible secret and a horrible curse put on Jeb's father 20 years earlier. The curse is now acting itself out, and the Coffin family is crazed with fear as the Coffin sons die gruesome deaths one by one. The body count is high, and Philbrick uses gloomy, graphic and gory means to dispatch the victims, but the story lacks suspense and pegs very low on the spooky meter. Sadly, the well-crafted pre Civil War abolitionist angle is merely window dressing for an unconvincing tale of superstition awash in blood and body parts.
