All the Pretty Dead Girls by John Manning

All the Pretty Dead Girls
by John Manning
Pinnacle Books, 2009.

Going off to college for the first time is always an adventure, but for Sue Barlow, it promises to be so much more. She will finally be on her own, away from the stifling grasp of the grandparents who raised her after the death of her mother. Sue hopes that Wilbourne College, her mother's alma mater in upstate New York, will give her both the freedom that she has never enjoyed and information about the parents she never knew. What she finds there is far more terrifying than she could have ever imagined.

All the Pretty Dead Girls by John Manning reminds me of a Dean Koontz novel or something by Clive Barker, without being quite as tightly written. The plot moves along nicely, for the most part, except for the back and forth between the past and the present, which I found a little disconcerting at times. This is definitely a "page-turner" in the most positive way and the twists of the plot surprised me more than a few times. It is not predictable or boring. I found the characters believable and pretty well fully-formed and although their dialogue sometimes falls a little flat the characters are not. I found myself conjuring them up in my mind... seeing what they would look and sound like.

I liked All the Pretty Dead Girls even though it runs a little more toward horror than I normally go these days. I was drawn in from the first page and read it straight through to the last. If you are a fan of Dean Koontz or Clive Barker, or even Peter Straub, I think you will enjoy All the Pretty Dead Girls.