M. Costello

"Don't let the bed bugs bite.It started with a little boy. A little boy who sneaked out to go to the pool and was never seen again. Old Miss Waverly disappeared soon afterward. And then that hot shot student vanished into thin air. Things like this just didn't happen in a quiet town like Harley. Except Harley was no longer a quiet town.Noah was getting scared. He Knew something bad was happening because his father came home looking worried every night. And his mother wouldn't let him go anywhere alone. Then the dreams began. The dreams about the Tall Man. The Tall Man was coming to get him. The Tall Man was coming to steal a little boy's soul---and feed off his innocence."

A real TIGHT horror story, with a distinct eighties flavor!, July 8, 2002
What can I say? SLEEP TIGHT is one of those books that you can read in under 4 hours (it clocks in at 300 pages) and that still leaves you real satisfied after putting it down.

SLEEP TIGHT was published in 1987 at it really has the feel of that time (to me anyway). I can just picture this as a movie, standing in between EVIL DEAD II, Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees (to which there are references) and offcourse Don Coscarelli's PHANTASM (the main baddie here is even called The Tall Man, just like Angus Scrimm!).

The plot is pretty standard supernaturalhorror stuff, with a creature from some other dimension that kills people and has to be stopped. I heard Matt Costello is really big on HP Lovecraft, and his influences show, with an unpronounceable evil and all kinds of tentacle/pseudopodlike things grabbing at innocent victims.

Like I stated earlier, it's fun, just don't except this book, and it's characters to go too deep. To use a cliche, it's almost like a B-movie put to paper(although, once in a while, that's not a bad thing).

There are some minor qualms in that the baddie resembles the PHANTASM movies a little bit TOO much and that the local police buy a little bit TOO easy into the fantastic explainations the professor character is given them (he's a holocaust survivor and kind of the Van Helsing to this story-- I'm afraid to say, all that's been done before also).

However, this kind of horror isn't about originality, but about the kind of feelings it evokes in it's readers. For me it was both nostalgic and scary, and I haven't got any problems with that.

I've recently bought a few of Costello's other works, and I'll be sure to be reading them soon. Stay tuned!… (meer)