- Mass Market Paperback: 256 pages
- Publisher: St. Martin's Press (Mar 2002)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0312982712
- ISBN-13: 978-0312982713
- Product Dimensions: 17 x 9.4 x 1.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,951,394 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Mass Market Paperback
A senior at Harvard descends slowly into madness... or does he? Withdrawing to his quiet fourth-floor room of Adams House to write a Hamlet thesis, he is swept into his own battle with ghosts of betrayal and deceit.
Harbouring guilt over the suicide of his roommate Billy two years previous, he is convinced that Billy knew he was having an affair with his girlfriend. Guilt spills over to paranoia with the arrival of a mysterious dandy claiming to be a fellow student.
This gothic tale will keep you up at night; it is chill-you-to-the-bone frightening. Desmond manages to create an impermeable atmosphere of claustrophobic paranoia which ensures the reader remains guessing throughout. The plot does get a bit confusing at times; Desmond tends to rush ahead and clarify later, but that does not obstruct the telling of a fascinatingly blood-curdling thriller.
Buy this book now!
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
7 reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Abandon should ber abandoned
10 July 2007
Format:Mass Market Paperback
I give this one star because there is no lower mark. As an avid reader, this has to be an all time low of the all time lows in my 70 years of reading! It escapes me how any reader could find something in this novel to enable a movie to be written. Makes one wonder if Desmond had some pull in the movie industry before he wrote this horrendous tome.
If there were anyone I truly despised, I would recommend this book to them. A perfect waste of one's time~
If there were anyone I truly despised, I would recommend this book to them. A perfect waste of one's time~
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
very original and entertaining!
16 April 2002
Format:Mass Market Paperback
Well, first off, this is the kind of book I like. Throw in a few plots that doesn't make sense with each other and then throw an UHA! ending ending that connects them. The story was very well written by this newcomer. It just had some of the flaws every new writer has, like, sometimes I had to go back to say "Oh! THAT was what he was talking 'bout". I saw the movie at a special screening back in January and it was very good, and it had some major changes(the main character in the book is a dude and in the movie is a chick, Katie Holmes- she did a great job). I think I liked it so much 'cause I've felt some of the pressures this guy has felt, though I'm NOT crazy, I think. I'll describe the book as Donnie Darko meets A Beautiful Mind. overall 4/5.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
So-So Poe
21 May 2002
Format:Mass Market Paperback
This is one of those walk-the-line supernatural/psychological horror stories, a la Henry James or Edgar Allen Poe, in which you can never quite be sure whether ghosts are influencing events, or the protagonist of the piece is psychotic. It's a tough genre to pull off, and Desmond half succeeds - which means he half doesn't. I probably would have liked this book more, if it: a. wasn't so hallucinogenic that it's hard to follow; b. was told in something other than first person, so it wasn't so hard to follow; and c. was clearer on what was going on, so it wasn't so hard to follow. It doesn't help matters any that I'm a jaded reader of this very genre, and recently read Graham Masterton's Trauma, which is very similar but much better written and more effective.
That said, Abandon does at least tell a coherent story, once you go back and re-read a few things and puzzle it out. It meanders a bit, and it becomes fairly clear early on that the protagonist is less influenced by ghosts than he is simply criminally schizophrenic - put more simply, I never believed any ghosts were present (even if some nominal doors are left open for that interpretation), and was far ahead of the surprise plot revelations the whole way.
The greatest problem this book has is that none of its characters are really sympathetic. The most sympathy that can be evinced is for the victims, not because they are likeable (or unlikeable either, for that matter), but simply because they don't deserve to be murdered. None of them are developed enough to have any feelings about, one way or the other - they merely exist as ciphers for the crazed protagonist to deal with. The protagonist (who is never even given a name) tells the entire story in first-person narrative, and is so painfully self-absorbed that an unbiased presentation of the victims wouldn't be possible anyway, even if he bothered to talk about them more.
This would make a good movie, if the plot were presented more comprehensibly. However, the slated upcoming Paramount film sounds actually more confusing than its source material - it turns the protagonist into a woman (Katie Holmes), which, given some of the plot turns of the novel, is going to be problematic at best...though it sounds, from early reports, as if it's all been pretty thoroughly rewritten into a completely different piece, anyway.
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