Douglas Clegg - The Children's Hour

[andydecker]

Douglas Clegg – The Children's Hour (Dell Books, 1995, pb, 383 pages)


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

Something is terribly wrong with the children of Colony, West Virginia. They come out at night — to hunt. When Joe Gardner and his family return to the small town of Colony, they discover a nightmarish force taking over the old mining town.

When Douglas Clegg delivered this manuscript to Dell and thanked Jeanne Cavelos of Dell/Abyss for the nice welcome in the acknowledgments, one can only speculate if the sudden demise of the Dell/Abyss line was already a topic. The writer had some bad luck here, and this was to be his only book at Dell. The Children's Hour was initially planed as a Dell/Abyss book, but was published as a nondescript Dell Horror.

Anyway, the novel was not well received over the years, often seen as too much a "homage" to King's Salem's Lot and other of his topics. It is just another small town threatened by evil with a capital E story which at the time was slightly overused already.