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Jake's Wake (2008)

by John Skipp(Favorite Author)

3.58 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0843960760 (ISBN13: 9780843960761)

languge

English

genre

Horror

publisher

Leisure Books

review 1: Small-time Televangelist Jacob "Jake" Connaway is dead, murdered by the jealous boyfriend of the latest bar trolling skirt that Jake caught. But those attending the hypocritical minister's wake find that you can't keep a truly good bad man down, when Jake wakes up and climbs out of his coffin...with Hell following with him.Jake's Wake is one of those odd disappointments: a very well-written novel that goes nowhere, but looks and sounds good while doing so.What little meat there is on the skeleton narrative that collaborators John Skipp (The Light At The End, The Bridge) and Cody Goodfellow (Radiant Dawn) have constructed is largely of the sex and violence variety. Although the novel's "story" takes something like one hundred pages to finally move from plot point A to plo... moret point B, the rather large cast of cannon fodder really isn't developed to any great depth. Skipp and Goodfellow seem content to simply describe the horrific events in the brisk "cinematic style" of a film novelization.The reason for this might very well be that Jake's Wake is a novelization, sort of. John Skipp's section of the author acknowledgments states that the book "started out as a motion picture." That certainly explains the odd lightness to the novel's first two hundred pages. But it does not forgive that a collection of characters that arrive on the scene in the third act, just to liven things up a bit, with car chases, gun fights, and gruesome death set pieces, are better developed than the supposed cast of primary characters the reader has spent the previous two hundred pages "getting to know."Then there is the novel's ironic twist ending, which is a nice one. Hell, it's even a brilliant one. While, in retrospect, there are a few subtle hints for it sprinkled throughout the book, Skipp and Goodfellow don't really dig into it. Probably because, as with most theologically themed mainstream horror stories, the religious aspects have to be kept vague, so the book can appeal to a variety of Believer (or Non-Believer, such as myself) backgrounds/doctrines.As I said at the start of the review, this book was a disappointment. Not because it is "bad," because it isn't. It is very well written book, for both Skipp and Goodfellow are exceptionally talented writers, that held my interest even during the so long as to be noticeable stretches of narrative padding in the novel's first hundred or so pages. It's just that the damn feels so slight. As I was reading it, I found myself thinking that this book would have made a great novella, rather than a weak, although modestly effective novel (there is a moment in a darkened basement that is a textbook perfect example of horror done right) that could have very easily been so much more than it ultimately wound up being.
review 2: In JAKE’S WAKE by John Skipp, now officially one of my favorite authors, and Cody Goodfellow, Pastor Jake is a psychopath who also happens to be a televangelist with a strong following of devout Christians. When his excesses lead to his murder, a small group of people gather at his remote mansion to mourn and fight over exactly who Jake was: a man of God or a man with a gluttonous appetite for evil. Jake has one more surprise in store for them–he rises from the dead and returns home to deliver pain and death upon those who had been closest to him in life in a night of pure terror. It’s classic Skipp–a small group of people terrorized by a seemingly indestructible monster with an insatiable appetite for human suffering. The premise goes beyond that, however, as Jake intends to use his resurrection as the chance to build a religion around himself, and Skipp and Goodfellow widen the story to include news of Jake’s return drawing a wide cast of heroes and weirdos to the mansion. The ending is surprisingly satisfying. Far more than just “our plucky hero/heroine makes it,” it packs a punch and, with the delivery of the last line, even a little poignancy. less

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