DECEMBER PARK Paperback – 1 Mar. 2014

A coming of age tale in the tradition of 'It'/'The Body', this book starts out well and promises much, but about a third of the way through I started to find it pretty hard going. It started to feel like a horror film where all the jump scenes turn out to be the cat after all - apart from various anonymous teenagers going missing - our teenage protagonists end up plodding around one spooky deserted building after another, with essentially not much happening right until close to the end. Yes I know that KIng carried off a similar plot in 'The Body', but frankly his characters are better developed, there is more humour - and 'The Body' is only a novella, whereas this plods on for what seems like forever. It doesn't help that I wasn't really in sympathy with what they were up to - they withhold evidence and information from the police which could helped to solve the crime, to say nothing of endangering their own lives. The ending is very good and a genuine surprise but by that time I had almost lost the will to live. Some nice descriptive writing but certainly isn't my favourite Malfi book to date.

This is a hard book for me to review; I was under the impression it was a horror. It most certainly is not. As I read I came to think it was a thriller, but it hardly is that either. It defies my definition of any genre and yet I liked the book, very much. More than anything it is a coming of age story, five boys on the cusp of manhood in the early 1990s, set against the backdrop of their town being gripped by fear from a rash of disappearing young teens. The boys become obsessed with finding out who is responsible. The papers have nicknamed the perpetrator "The Piper" and while no bodies are found it's assumed there is a serial killer on the loose. So, the boys spend the summer finding a couple of clues, hanging out in the park which has been deemed a "no go" area by the authorities and travelling all over town on their bikes exploring old abandoned places they haven't visited since they were kids, or ever. The story is more about the boys, this last summer together (though they don't know it), getting to know them, their camaraderie. They are the only friends each other has, mostly, they are not toughs but they smoke and don't do well at school, not really belonging to any clique other than each other. I really enjoyed the story in a "Stand By Me" kind of way, the creepy background gives it some suspense and there are a few intense moments but nothing really ever happens until the final pages for a book with over 600 pages. The ending is a rush, a twist, a surprise, and wrapped up somewhat too neatly with some questions never answered. So not a wholly satisfying ending, and yet in the grand scheme, I felt the boys' relationship was the main theme and that did end satisfyingly and bittersweet. If I'd known from the outset I was reading a coming of age story, and hadn't been expecting horror or thriller, I'd have rated the book higher.

I liked the atmosphere of the book. The longer you read, the more you feel the small town flair and you can empathize with the experience and emotions of the 5 teenagers.The disappearance of eight young people overshadows the whole thing. What is suppressed in the beginning, gradually becomes a cruel truth. There's a serial killer in Harting Farms, the Piper. Angelo and his friends decide to start their own manhunt for the Piper. Together they`re getting closer to the history of Harting Farms and its forgotten and abandoned corners.In the end, there's the truth... that changes everything....I received an ARC from the pubisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I received this book through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program.I'm a little conflicted on this book. As a bildungsroman, it's great - well observed, realistic characters, interesting arcs - but as a mystery the end is a complete wash out.The two genres clash in awkward places, pulling a reader out of the novel. On the one hand, as a bildungsroman, it makes sense of the teenagers of the town to be so divided from the adults and to keep their own counsel. As a mystery, it's ludicrous; the teenagers are actively obstructing the investigation and endangering their own lives. Even the main character allows his police officer father to follow lines of investigation he knows are dead ends (like the girl who is assumed to have gone off with someone she knew having actually snuck out for a smoke). Thematically it highlights the division between adults and teenagers, but realistically it jars.Overall, I enjoyed it, and it's a nice insight into small town east coast America. Malfi just about gets away with the self-inserted references to Stephen King because his writing as a whole really is comparable. The sense of dread that hangs over the town is gradually ramped up, the idea that it really could be anyone the boys know, including each other. It's a shame, really, that the final resolution has no connection to the mystery plot (and everything to the bildungsroman), since the mystery is what gives the plot its forward momentum, rather than the character study.

I did expect a lot from this book as Ronald Malfi is a fav author of mine. This is a coming of age story built around the murder and disappearance of a number of teenagers. I found the story a little overlong and within those 700 pages very little seemed to happen as the kids chased and cycled around on their bikes trying to find the murderer who they called the Piper...and that's it! So a little disappointed but as always RM kept me reading with his great style and ability to create believable and human characters that any reader can associate with.