Ray Garton The Folks

The Folks

Ray Garton

Cemetery Dance, 2001, $40.00

ISBN: 1587670380

After the fire ravaged his face, Andy Sayers came to live with his grandma in the remote village Pinecrest, isolated even from other towns on Mount Crag. Andy lives apart from the townsfolk, not just because he finds their fundamentalist Christian control insidious, but also because adults look at his face in horror. Still he has dated, though his ex-girlfriend recently became the victim of a serial killer. He earns a scholarship to attend the local Hand of God College, which elates his true believing grandma that he will find Jesus there.

On Halloween, Amanda Bollinger drives Andy to a nearby graveyard where she seduces him with her incredibly elongated tongue, but as he is in the midst of passion, something wrong grips his testicles. He wants to run, but Amanda persuades him to come to the family mansion where he meets her family, a brood of people, who as the result of incest, have physical and mental disorders that would make a circus side show seem normal. Because of his scarred visage, he is the Chosen One to lead THE FOLKS of the Bollinger brood.

Though the graphic details of the FOLKS may turn off some readers, fans of Gothic horror will enjoy this tense thriller. The storyline of to be or not to be, as Bollinger takes a back seat to the sinister suspense laden atmosphere in which the audience expects bad things to happen to Andy. Several key members of the Bollinger minion have distinct personalities, including the patriarch, who wants to groom Andy as his heir, the sex predator Amanda, and a boy-man with strange ethics. Not a typical read, fans who appreciate something different in their horror tales will want to read this cross between Layton's Beast House and Browning's Freaks.