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Posts Tagged ‘patrick melton’

Reviewed by Douglas R. Cobb

If you would like to read a perfect Halloween book, or a chilling, thrilling novel to read at any time of the year, look no further than the awesomely suspenseful, spine-tingling Black Light, by the writing team of Patrick Melton, Marcus Dunstan, & Stephen Romano. Their names should sound familiar to fans of the Saw franchise, as Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunston wrote the screenplays for Saw IV, Saw V, Saw VI, and Saw 3D. Also, they wrote the screenplay for The Collector, and are filming The Collector 2. Black Light delivers the goods, and Buck Carlsbad and his unique Gift that allows him to Pull ghosts into his body by using his will instead of the proton packs like in Ghostbusters makes for one of the coolest and most bad-ass characters of the horror genre.

Buck Carlsbad is the first-person narrator of Black Light. He was found trapped in a car with the windows up in Arizona in the summer when he was a boy, and the intense heat cause him to experience amnesia about his parents and background up until then. He didn’t even remember his own name, so chose the name Buck Carlsbad himself. He received training in several martial arts, and also eventually discovers he can communicate with the dead and trap them within his own body for a short time, until he can dispose of them later by regurgitating them into funeral urns and burying them.

While the dead are within him, he can see things that they see, a world of different levels of intense Blacklight. The light is so strong, he needs to wear filtered goggles to protect his eyes. He has learned that he can sometimes pull out items from his own past, a past he doesn’t remember, that should hold some sort of meaning for him. The goggles he wears come from one such encounter with his own past, and he believes that they must have belonged to his father, and that his father also rid the world of the harmful spirits of murderers and child molesters as he does now. Buck’s services don’t come cheap, generally speaking, but he sometimes just wants to ingest as many spirits as he can, and progress ever lower down into the lowest levels of the Blacklight, in his attempt to gain as much knowledge as he can about his parents. It is a dangerous thing to do that can cost him his life, but it’s worth it to him. Read the rest of this entry »