Lurk by Adam Vine Book Review

Book Review of Lurk by Adam Vine

Lurk by Adam Vine is a serious book of consummate horror. The story is about a youth hostel called Sunny Hill where the tenants party hard. The main character Drew Mayhem (Mayhem isn’t his real name), a student of film studies, is a video game lover, a horror freak, therefore overweight. Carter who has a physique like a Greek God is Drew’s role-model. He has a barbie like girlfriend Natalia. There’s Beatriz with spectacular legs. Drew often has bouts of fantasies about Bea. Ray’s one of his best friends. He is also the lover of Beatriz. There is a neighbour Benny, who’s weirdness knows no bounds. There is Skoakland, the cop who is – rather strangely - the only one to respond to a 911 call made from anywhere in that area.

Naturally when you mix up all these ultra-weird characters in a cauldron, you only produce the most terrifying brew - Lurk. To add to the horror, there are passive aggressive soliloquies in italics. Sounds like Stephen King? Well, this book is greatly influenced by Stephen King. I mean, even if you ignore the frequent mention of King’s works like The Shining, It etc, and overlook the italicised inner voices, and swear words, a lot of influence is still visible in the prose style. This is good. We all love Stephen King. The sentences are brief, the dialogues are realistic and there’s hardly a word that is unnecessary.

The plot of Lurk by Adam Vine is complicated. It’s bound to be. The characters are complex. Their relationships are complex. They have things going on under the surface and you can only make intelligent guesses by carefully observing the turbulence above. The number of characters in Lurk tends to infinity, though the minor characters don’t usually interfere with the plot except on 3-4 occasions.

I don’t know where the young students who know nothing better other than partying every single night, actually study. Probably there was a mention of some university somewhere in Lurk, but I don’t remember it right now. These students, almost always dead drunk, explore the basement of Sunny Hill. They find a few photographs. Their subjects keep changing every time Drew looks at them.  They show him the future. They also show him the naked figure of Beatriz masturbating. After seeing this photo and after masturbating to his heart’s content, Drew decides to burn them.

They make a big show of burning the photographs. They hurl abuses to Benny, the neighbour who seems to be indifferent of the world’s choicest curses. Afterwards the corpse of Benny is found. He has committed suicide, it appears. It is later discovered that officer Skoakland was also among the few who resided in Sunny Hill. He was the one of the two surviving members of 93’s Sunny Hill tenants. The other one’s Apple.

There are serial killings, ghosts, mysteries, violence, nightmares – anything that comes under the horror genre –are all wrapped up in between the two covers of Lurk by Adam Vine. I admire his style and presentation, though the influence of Stephen King is visible too much. The book has that exceptional quality of keeping you glued to it, till you finish.

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