- Release Date: December 2012
- Author: Tim Curran
- Publisher: DarkFuse
- Page Count: 390 pages
The Long Black Coffin is a ’67 GTO. A street-eater and a life-taker. Like an open grave, it’s hungry for death.
Vic Tamberlyn committed suicide in it. His son Kurt asphyxiated in it. Maybe there’s no connection, but Kurt’s best friend, Johnny Breede, doesn’t believe it. He begins seeing dark connections, convinced that beneath the skin of the Coffin there beats a black, terrible heart. But it’s even worse than he can imagine.
For the Long Black Coffin has a history. And that history will lead Johnny into a web of murder, insanity, and sexual perversion. He’ll learn gruesome family secrets that connect a decade-old series of child abductions to a primordial evil that lives on in the car in the form of a sadistic teenage girl.
A girl whose mother was human, but whose father was anything but.
When I first read the above synopsis about Tim Curran’s newest book I thought to myself…”Oh, no…not another Christine.” Christine being one of my least favorites of Mr King’s work. But I needn’t have worried with Mr. Curran at the helm.
Though both tales are about a haunted car, that is where the similarities ended for me and to tell you the truth I thought “Long Black Coffin” was much better than “Christine”.
Even though “Long Black Coffin” is about a haunted car, it is much deeper than that and I found it was more about one man’s journey to find the answers to his best friend’s suicide, his guilt, his anger, his pain and suffering. And of course the answers he finds are not anything quite like he expected and are absolutely terrifying.
As I have come accustomed to with Mr. Curran’s work, the atmosphere he creates in this tale is dark, frightening and quite unsettling. The story just grabs hold of you from the first page and won’t let you go. You will be drawn deep into this story, reading feverishly until the cataclysmic ending.
The characters are first rate and very believable as breathing, living beings, each playing their part in the terrifying events surrounding the “Long Black Coffin”. I came to care about the main character Johnny Breede and what happened to him, and as I have said on numerous occasions the characters make the story for me. It does not matter how good the writing or story is, if the characters are not believable it all falls apart for me. But you needn’t worry in this case Tim has created some fascinating characters.
I have been reading Tim’s work for a while now and he never fails to deliver, with “Long Black Coffin” I believe he has given us his best work to date and I highly recommend it and am very much looking forward to his next book.
