I’ve been noticing more and more collaboration novels in the horror genre lately. I’ve always been curious as to how two different authors can concoct a story together and keep everything seemlessly cohesive. Matt Hayward and Patrick Lacey are able to do just that in Practitioners. You really can’t tell who wrote what. The tone, pacing, characters and delivery are evenly matched. So kudos to them for being able to utilize the age-old saying, “Two heads are better than one.”
Practitioners uses elements of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Phantasm, Hellraiser, and various Lovecraft tales and brings it all together through the plight of Henry Stapleton. Henry is a police detective on administrative leave while he attempts to pick up the pieces of the senseless and seemingly random murder of his wife. Henry is trying to make sense of it all, but appears to be losing his mind due to his excessive drinking and inability to seperate hallucinations from reality. In an attempt to get a handle on his life, he visits a spirituality center in a downtown strip mall that promises to teach him how to interpret and control his troubled dreams. This is where the story picks up steam and crosses back and forth from crime drama to horror to fantasy and back again. Oddly enough, this is also when the story becomes more focused. Even though I was enjoying the characters, I felt that the beginning was too muddied to understand what I was reading. I get that the writers were trying to keep everything in shadows, but to me, maybe the delivery could’ve been a little better, a little clearer. All in all, a solid story from two talented authors.
3 1/2 Alternate Realities out of 5
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