Product Description

Joe Kieran has found that unearthing the truth for a newspaper can be painful, and telling it, heartbreaking. Hiding from his past big city exposés in the quiet coastal town of Terrel, he stumbles upon a web of mysterious teen suicides that somehow connect a ring of five women. Is there really a malevolent presence inside Terrel Cliff that holds all of the town in thrall as Angelica, a fortune teller, suggests? Or is there a murderous covenant between five women to sacrifice their first-born? When Angelica is kidnapped right under his nose, Joe suspects that there is more at work in Terrel than a dark, tragic streak.

Deep beneath the remains of a long-demolished lighthouse on its tragic cliff, Joe discovers Terrel's secret history and salvation. And in his desperate bid to save two women, he forges a new covenant, one that puts his own soul in deadly danger.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #293757 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 296 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780843960181
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Customer Reviews

Be careful what you agree to...

Covenant is spine tingling and addictive. John Everson delivers a twisted treat that is loaded with suspense, a strong multifaceted plot, and taut characters. His words and imagery give us a firsthand feel of what it's like to reside in a small town, a place fueled by secrets and driven by fear.

Enter Joe Kiernan, a reporter for the small town of Terrel. After having worked at several fast-paced and prestigious jobs, he looks forward to the change of scenery and the quiet ways of a smaller scale way of life. Until the sad truth bites him in the ass. Stuck with low-level tasks and listening in on police radios for the latest minuscule town's perils, he questions why he bothered. One evening, things come to an abrupt change, but not necessarily for the better. Joe reveals a news story that threatens to pull the rug right out from under the tight-lipped residents. Terrel's Cliff has become the official site of a coincidental string of suicides. Each year, on May 22nd, a child jumps to his or her death. The townspeople try to pretend otherwise, but for five women - it's an event that haunts their every waking moment. A pact, a twisted covenant is revealed, that was entered into over a hundred years ago as the only means of survival. But not survival for the children.

Joe digs into his own investigations, visits an eccentric seer, and tries to get to the bottom of what it is about Terrel's Cliff that compels a child to end their life without so much as a warning? And why have the people accepted it as a normal way of life? The truth as it is revealed, is terrifying and will keep you plowing through the pages. Hidden among the dirty secrets, we learn of a demon with an agenda so powerful, no one is safe. John Everson's style is composed and direct. He gives us believable small town characters, complete with their own set of skeletons and superstitions.

Covenant will whisk you away into a deep embedded darkness, where you are sure to wonder if you'll ever get back out. I highly recommend this fast paced, solid read by an articulate author who has what it takes to give readers exactly what they want.

This is NOT a good book.
I can't believe this book won the Bram Stoker Award. I was very dissapointed in this book. The only reason I finished the book was because I figured it had to get better since it was a Stoker Award winner. Wrong. This book is considered horror but I did not find any part of the book scary. Also, the sex/rape scenes were ridiculous. Clearly the author was writng out some teenage fanatsy but that does make for good literature. Save your time and money.

Has some promise, but falls victim to first-novel pitfalls
Everson's writing has enough quality to make him durable on the paperback market, but unfortunately his first novel has too many flaws.
*Setting: Everson gives us a cliched small-town setting with little to no memorability (a staple overused in the horror genre.)
*Characters: Everson's cast is full of horror conventions: a typical "Average Joe" main character (whose name is actually Joe), an old janitor that warns people away from the "evil place," a gypsy with a persistently false accent, and a blonde teenage girl whose boyfriend is killed that the main character catches on the rebound.
*Writing Style: Everson's writing style is rather direct. I have to give him credit for constructing several admirable similes and metaphors to describe and add a dark atmosphere to his writing.
*Dialogue: Everson's biggest problem is dialogue attribution (i.e. "he said," "she said," etc.) Instead of opting for the elegant and invisible "said" as an attribution, myriads of cumbersome tags are used, including: murmured, whispered, muttered, answered, breathed, mocked, grinned, countered, warned, pronounced and demanded. The list goes on. This attribution problem reeks of amateurism in writing, of a writer trying to "spice up" those dialogue tags and instead drawing attention to his use of words. Many of the attributions are physical impossibilites (how can you "grin" words?) I must say, though, this is the easiest problem to edit.
*Miscellaneous: Everson's novel has good pacing, but falls victim to noticeable writing errors. Joe, the protagonist, is frequently shown riding in his car on the way to a scene where something is actually going to happen instead of just starting the chapter with him arriving. Much of the opening chapters is encumbered by page after page of newspaper accounts of the cliff jumpings. Every agonizing detail of Joe Kieran's collecting of the newspapers is shown. Every date is written down and described and contemplated by our hero Joe. Everson should cut out these miscellaneous problems to make his writing more streamlined.
*Premise: I won't reveal plot details, but I will say the novel's premise and the nature of the Covenant was indeed original.

There's my two cents on Covenant. I'm sorry to be so hard on Mr. Everson's first novel, but I wanted to say everything I could. Addressing these problems could be the difference between Mr. Everson rising in the hierarchy of writers or floundering in the midlist for quite some time.