Purity
A Short Novel
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
"Purity is a gripping, shocking story of love, turning 18 and murder…" -Doubleshot Reviews
"Douglas Clegg turns the screws dexterously in this sleek, multifaceted suspense story...in a vacation paradise saturated in alcohol, entitlement and hypocrisy..." - Publisher's Weekly.
In PURITY, the darkest force is love. From award-winning author Douglas Clegg comes a dark psychological thriller of dangerous obsession.
Clegg writes gut-wrenchingly beautiful horror…painful adolescence, abuse, sociopathic alienation, and coming home - are all at play here, as are characters who play each other and themselves...for keeps."- Chizine.
Owen Crites has watched Jenna Montgomery become a beautiful young woman as they've practically grown up together through the summer.
Owen is the gardener's son who will one day become groundskeeper of the Montgomery summer estate on Outerbridge Island, off the New England coast.
Now, both of them teenagers, Owen begins to understand that Jenna is meant for a different life in adulthood than he is destined for -- and he knows that he must somehow keep her on the island until she no longer wants to leave.
But there's a shadowed evil nestled in Owen's heart.
Enter Jimmy McTeague, the young tennis star from Manhattan, heir to a sporting goods fortune, has also come to spend the summer with the Montgomery's -- and soon, a triangle of love, hate, and the darkest of human impulses emerges.
Praise for Douglas Clegg's Fiction
"Clegg is the best horror writer of the post-Stephen King generation."
— Bentley Little, author of The Policy
"Clegg delivers!"
— John Saul, bestselling author of Faces of Fear and The Devil's Labyrinth.
"A master of the genre. Absolutely thrilling! Douglas Clegg is the future of dark fantasy."
— Sherrilyn Kenyon
New York Times bestselling author of the Dark-Hunters.
"Douglas Clegg has become the new star in horror fiction."
— Peter Straub
author of Lost Boy, Lost Girl and the New York Times Bestseller Black House (with Stephen King)
"Clegg's stories can chill the spine so effectively that the reader should keep paramedics on standby."
— Dean Koontz
"Clegg is one of the best!"
— Richard Laymon
"Douglas Clegg is a weaver of nightmares!"
— Robert R. McCammon
author of The Queen of Bedlam and Speaks The Nightbird.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Clegg (You Come When I Call You ) 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 rivalDand 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. FYI: Clegg won an International Horror Guild Award for his short-fiction collection The Nightmare Chronicles at the World Horror Convention in May.
