Widowed architect Arthur Latimer has become a recluse in his own home: a storm-proof fortress that doubles as a shrine to his dead wife. But the outside world beckons in the form of a bizarre party downbeach.
Now, just as the biggest hurricane ever to hit the Pacific Northwest rolls in with deadly force, Art is subjected to intrusions from his past and invasions from the present. And soon he begins to doubt everything he sees or thinks he already knows. And soon you may too.
Genre: Psychological thriller.
***
From Publishers Weekly
Storms raging outdoors and in the mind of the protagonist create a maelstrom of menace in this sinuous psychological thriller by Schow (The Kill Riff, The Shaft). A whopper of a hurricane is barreling up the California coast, and renegade architect Art Latimer is planning to ride it out and test the structural integrity of his self-designed dream home. At the same time, he's struggling to batten down powerful feelings about his wife, Lorelle, whose death two years before sent him into an emotional tailspin. As the storm intensifies, a string of peculiar experiences suggest that the foundations of his reality are wobbling. He finds an old bottle washed up on the beach containing a cryptic message that speaks eerily to him. Then he's visited by a long-lost friend who mysteriously disappears without a trace from the premises. Meanwhile, a wild house party is underway down the beach and host Price, a steely manipulator who employs drugs and humiliation to control his guests, schemes to use the storm as cover for playing sinister mind games with Art. Schow works suspenseful sleight-of-hand with his story elements, skillfully underplaying the significance of clues and deftly managing character viewpoints to direct what the reader sees. His kinetic orchestration of events-action sequences, moments of moving intimacy and the richly symbolic tempest outside-and vivid hardboiled prose push the plot to a thunderclap climax that in less assured hands would seem farfetched but here is a measure of coolly calculated audacity.
***
From Booklist
Schow is a recognized name in the horror field, credited with coining the term splatterpunk and probably best known for his screenplay of the cult film The Crow. (This may be part of the reason this novel often seems more like a screen treatment than a full-bodied piece of fiction.) Evoking both John Fowles' The Magus and Ed Woods' Glen or Glenda (but leaning heavily toward campy schlock rather than higbrow lit), Schow experiments with the concepts of sexual identity, personality disintegration, and megalomania. A recluse living near the ocean gets mixed up in a confrontation with a bunch of people from a nearby house who have been fed a cocktail of mind-altering drugs. There's also a hurricane brewing. It's all fairly predictable with the exception of a gender switch involving the main character. On the plus side, the writing is generally smooth, the dark-and-stormy-night settings are well crafted, and the characters are interesting if not always believable. Schow doesn't quite make this odd book work, but his considerable following will want to see for themselves.
***
"A jagged nightmare spiked with charm, melancholy, and vicious intelligence."
-Michael Marshall Smith, author of Only Forward
"Bullets of Rain is a highly original, boldly conceived psychological thriller observed with the rapt eye and assassin's sting of the artist as fer-de-lance."
-John Farris, author of The Fury and the Power
"David Schow's Bullets of Rain is a thriller, a literary metaphor, and one dark speeding bullet of a novel. Edgy, insightful, and fearless, it's a book I couldn't put down."
-Joe R. Lansdale, Edgar Award-winning author of A Fine Dark Line
"In Bullets of Rain, David J. Schow has given us his boldest, most audacious fiction to date. Here, all of Schow's glittering weapons are sharper than ever before."
-Peter Straub
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