John Saul's latest work of horror is a story about three families and their three teenage boys who leave Chicago to spend their summer vacation in a small rural town on a lake.  When the boys find a hidden room, they begin having horrible nightmares, and all hell breaks loose.

Hopefully, this paragraph is enough to feed your curiosity, because there isn't much more to the story than this. The main characters are all two-dimensional.  By the end of the book, you still don't know anything more about them other than their names. There are only one or two characters with any back-story, which is a shame; to me character development is one of the most important parts of any novel.

Saul focuses instead on trying to describe the bloody events that transpire in as gruesome a language as possible while loading each sentence up with adverbs and similes, which only serves to give the entire book a juvenile quality. The dialogue is stilted and awkward, or perhaps it only seems that way because I listened to the audiobook version, read by Mel Foster. Unfortunately, Foster's monotone drone didn't bolster the story, and his inflections and pitch conflicted with the tone that the author was trying to set.

This is the first John Saul book I have read in over 10 years. I remember his earlier work being much better, but maybe I'm just remembering wrong. However, if a book like In the Dark of the Night can get published, there is still hope for us wannabe authors dreaming of one day finding our own writing sitting on a shelf at Barnes and Noble.

That's about the only positive thing I can say about this book: it gives me hope.