by Sarah Langan

Functioning as the anthropomorphic personification of the town's misery, there is Susan. Susan walks the streets—in a literal and sometimes metaphoric sense—spreading blight and misery in her wake. People fear and loathe her for a variety of reasons apart from the standard village need for an outcast figure, not least of all because she's got a knack for inspiring town-wide apocalyptic nightmares.

But when Susan dies under sudden and suspicious circumstances no one is particularly relieved. In fact, the all-encompassing visions of horror get worse, and the townspeople who didn't leave become trapped in place by a violent storm. Whatever strange horror has been waiting beneath Bedford spies a chance to emerge. Havoc, prepare to be wreaked.

On the surface, The Keeper looks like standard formula-horror fare. You've got a New England town with a dirty secret or two, a loathsome harbinger of doom, a series of spooky events, widespread night terrors, and a lot of small-town gossip that carries with it the seeds of the truth—and no good can come of it. But there's more going on here, and the overall effect is ultimately rich, weird, and more successful than I expected it to be.

At first, I was a little put off by the Cast of Thousands introduced in the first third of the book. The characterization is so deft that it's almost dry, and the roll call is so extensive that everyone starts to look alike. I knew too much about too many people—none of whom were, well, doing much of anything. I became impatient for Langan to wrap up all these yearbook summaries, even though I realized that gravitas was being established for future events.

But when all heck started straining at the leash, threatening to break loose in earnest, the real storytelling got underway and I found my patience rewarded.

Once the action begins, it never lets up and never slows down. As the Cast of Thousands is meticulously, creepily, almost happily whittled down to a Cast of Single Digits, the story gains momentum and strength. The key players are better drawn, more effectively motivated, and more engaging. I liked them better the more I got to know them, which only made me wish they hadn't been so lost in the monster-fodder character exposition at the beginning.

At any rate, there's plenty of danger to go around. The pressure and stakes are high, and all throughout Bedford, people are giving up, giving in, or rising to the occasion. Town residents both good and bad find their veneer of civility polished away by adversity, and whatever lies underneath comes gleaming or oozing through, as the case may be.

The Keeper is bold enough to take on some big ideas and big monsters, including (but not limited to) corporate greed, pollution, socio-economic class, and sexual abuse. But the overreaching, underlying theme seems to be one of abandonment. The town is abandoned by its founders, the workers are abandoned by their employers, the students are abandoned by their alcoholic teacher—who is then in turn abandoned by his wife and child, etcetera etcetera. This is a story where no one sticks around any longer than he or she has to . . . except for Susan, and everyone wishes she'd go away.

But no, even after death, Susan returns to them as a bleak messiah, bent on showing Bedford that it has not been altogether forsaken. She might have to destroy the town to demonstrate her warped but fervent fealty to it, but such is the very nature of fanaticism, obsession, and possessiveness. Does she love the town and wish to save it, or hate the town and wish to annihilate it? Too much tunnel vision in either direction, and it's hard to tell the difference.

And of course, true loyalty of any kind—even the relentless, dangerous kind—is hard to come by; it's so scarce in Bedford that the residents there don't recognize it when they see it. Sure, those who stay represent the forces of destruction, horror, and fiery death, but whatcha gonna do? After all, we don't get to pick the stalkers who devote themselves to us, in much the same way that we can't hand-select our biological families.

All in all, I found The Keeper to be a promising horror debut, if a somewhat inconsistent one. The first third tries too hard to establish too much—with too many threads, too many characters, and too much background for a set-up that could've been simple. It's elaborately tidy, and so meticulously drawn that it bogs itself down in detail.

But once the overly complex backdrop is established and left to do its job (read: function as background, instead of taking up all the foreground turf), the story picks up and runs at a wicked pace. The action is swift and serious, deftly woven, and appropriately brutal. Langan has a good feel for the way that personality dynamics can make or break a family, a town, or a story, and I think there's an excellent chance that her future projects will be genre forces with which to be reckoned.