Dead Souls
Michael Laimo
Leisure, Feb 2007, $6.99, 352 pages, ISBN: 0843957603
reviewed by Harriet Klausner

Johnny Petrie has had a very unhappy childhood living with his drunken father and a religious maniac of a mother who has controlled him all his life. Her mission in life is to make sure that evil doesn’t find her son. Johnny comes home one day and sees a letter addressed to him and because his mother is not home he dares to open it. It contains a letter from a lawyer in Wellfield. Maine informing him that he has inherited the estate of Benjamin Conroy worth over two million dollars.

When Johnny’s mother sees the letter, she goes into a convulsion and is rushed to the hospital where he learns her maiden name was Conroy. When he returns home, he finds his father dead of a suicide. Feeling there is nothing left for him in New York he travels to Wellfield to claim his inheritance. He doesn’t realize that the evil malevolence that claimed all the members of his family is waiting for him to join the rest of his kin….in hell.

The ability to scare a reader into sleeping with the lights on is something only a master of the horror genre can do and Michael Laimo will run up your electric bill. The horror slowly creeps up on the audience, catching them off guard when it turns into something from beyond. Like Stephen King, Mr. Laimo develops his characters so they seem real and evoke emotions of sympathy and pity for the protagonist and revulsion for Johnny’s biological father who formed his own form of religion which led to a family catastrophe.