Book Review: Black Fire

Reviewed By: Harriet Klausner

Black Fire     Amazon US PB Amazon US HC Amazon Canada PB Amazon Canada HC
James Kidman
Class/Genre:   Fiction   Horror
Cemetery Dance, 2004, $40.00

In Black Hills, Pennsylvania, seven years ago, eighteen-year-old high school student Eddie Farris killed his
abusive father, a prison guard in what the teen later called The Showdown. Eddie has since become a macabre
caricature of a boogeyman; everybody talks about him in a ghoulish way. The isolation started with his
girlfriend Rachel fleeing Black Hills right after the lethal Showdown.

Still over the next seven years the lonely Eddie tries to overcome the Showdown mental aftermath by following
his psychiatrist’s advice to write it down; though that has not proven a total catharsis, it helps. Eddie
constantly wonders if things would have been different if his younger sister Mary did not die when she was four
in an accident, but also believes his dad accidentally killed her during one of his abuser moments.

After seven years away, Rachel returns home accompanied by her son, Eddie’s child no one bothered to tell him
about. She claims that his father is harassing her with increasingly threatening phone calls, but Eddie killed
his sire in the Showdown or did he? He notices someone in the shadows stalking him, taunting him, threatening
him.

BLACK FIRE is a terrific tale that keeps the audience guessing whether Eddie finally lost his tenuous grip on
sanity, is being set up by others to lose his mind, or his dead dad dancing from the cemetery. Thus, readers
will consistently consider between psychological suspense and horror as James Kidman slowly delivers clues then
and now by rotating between the present and the Showdown. Strong thriller starring an intriguing individual who
at best has crossed the line between rational thinking and insanity as his past catches up to him now perhaps
with something evil from beyond.

Harriet Klausner

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Harriet Klausner