The Island - by T.M. Wright

The Many Pines Inn, an increasingly dilapidated summer resort on the shore of Seventh Lake, in the Adirondacks, is in need of some costly repairs.  Arnaut (pronounced Arno) Berge, hoping to raise some much needed revenue, decides to open up the Many Pines Inn for the winter.

What Arnaut Berge does not know is that the sunken house at the bottom of Seventh Lake is still inhabited.  That during the winter months the residents of that house crawl out to seek warmth; and the winter guests of the Many Pines Inn are very warm...

Wow.  Man really is the warmest place to hide, I guess.

Although I have not read a great many of T.M. Wright's books, the ones that I have read have all been memorably chilling.  The Island is no exception.  There were passages where I felt the chill of the weather, or of the haunting, or just of the impending and unavoidable doom that a great many of the novel's cast of sympathetic characters faced, in a palpable manner.

Wright's books are dreamlike.  The world the characters inhabit, while similar to the real world of the reader, is also just ever so slightly off.  A T.M. Wright novel, to borrow a phrase used by the English language challenged Arnaut Berge, "is at right angles" to the reader's waking reality.

Reading a T.M. Wright novel is like drifting from waking thought into a deranged dream that cannot be easily awoken from.  It is like becoming lost in a fog.  A fog that is filled with voices that do not speak above an impossible to hear whisper, and forms that stay just out of eyesight.  You don't really "read" a T.M. Wright novel, you experience it.

The Island is old school 80s "Quiet Horror" in the vein of Charles L. Grant.  It is a vein that I cannot drink from enough.  (In fact, if I am ever at point where someone asks me which Horror/Dark Fantasy writers have most influenced my own writing, I will say that Charles L. Grant and T.M. Wright, despite my not being all that widely read of the latter, have [along with Ramsey Campbell and Shirley Jackson] been my most powerful influences.)  It is a character driven novel, as opposed to a story driven one, so there really aren't any "Plot Point A" and "Plot Point C" handles to grip onto or explain.  There is just the increasing icy chill of the snow, the lake, and the dead people in the lake.  Cold dead people that just want to be warm.

No matter what time of year you choose to read The Island, there is no weather hot enough to keep you from feeling that chill, and from shivering, and from wanting to feel warm...

Comments

[TM Wright]

Hi,

Thank you so much for the kind words about The island. I am glad you understood my writing process.

Thank you again.

TM Wright