John Saul - Cry for the Strangers

[andydecker]

John Saul – Cry for the Strangers (Dell, 1979, 415 pages)

Cover found on the net. Thanks to the original scanner.

Clark's Harbor was the perfect coastal haven, jealously guarded against outsiders. But now strangers have come to settle there. And a small boy is suddenly free of a frenzy that had gripped him since birth... His sister is haunted by fearful visions... And one by one, in violent, mysterious ways the strangers are dying. Never the townspeople. Only the strangers. Has a dark bargain been struck between the people of Clark's Harbor and some supernatural force? Or is it the sea itself calling out for human sacrifice? A howling, deadly...Cry for the Strangers.

This is Saul's third published novel. Three books in three years is not bad, and the success was building.

In 1979 horror novels were on a roll. Stephen King with The Dead Zone, Peter Straub with Ghost Story, Ramsey Campbell with The Face that must Die and Jack D. Shackleford with The House of the Magus. Charles L. Grant won the World Fantasy Award for Shadows and Michael Moorcock for Gloriana, while in movies we got Alien, the Amityville Horror, Start Trek: the Motion Picture and Moonraker.

And John Saul managed to carve his niche with many novels to follow in the next decades.