Product Description: Lynn Devlin is a medical examiner who thinks she has seen everything Nye County has to throw at her. She copes with methodical, rational logic. But when a grotesque murder of a supposed alien abductee occurs that cannot be solved with her scalpel and microscope, Lynn finds her detachment is shattered, and her dreams haunted by large, dark, oval-shaped eyes. Now, only one thing is certain: There's a killer loose in the alien abductee community... human or otherwise!
Cinematic. Very good. I've always thought Whitley to be an excellent writer of horror fiction. I thought his first book on the UFO phenomenon, Communion, to be very good as well. Folllowng these books and for many years, I've mostly disagreed with both his optimism and his interpretation of many aspects of that same phenomenon, and I've wondered if there's not a certain degree of confabulation coming out in his UFO-related work, a self-defensive mechanism to protect his own psyche from something that did happen to him. In this way he has a lot in common with Richard S. Shaver, whom I also believe experienced something genuine (as least to him), and I look at this in two of my own nonfiction works.
I started to put this review at www.mottimorphic.com, but that would be doing Whitley a disservice, since more people will see it here. While I may disagree with him about many things, I think he, and the other creative people involved in this project, have really done something exceptional here. This is an outstanding melding of horror fiction and UFOlogical lore. The subject matter, particularly the human mutilation phenomenon, is not for the squeamish (as the Brazilian human mute cases--you can find pictures online--bear out), and is not lightly dismissed. The Nye Incidents pulls it all off quite well, leaving questions which I can only assume will be answered in a sequel or sequels (such as the oceanic connection he seems to be postulating, which is to say, a hidden earthly nature to the UFO phenomenon), and it begs for some sort of theatrical treatment or longer novelization.
Whitley's original night terrors are making a comeback in the horror realm, melding fiction with very real and very disturbing phenomena. I for one am glad to see him embrace the factual horror and terror of whatever fear and doubt he has himself experienced, without debating motives or various shades of gray. The non-humans in this book are evil--as the vast majority of experiencer accounts (real or imagined) bear out.
Very well done! I just wish it had been in color, but maybe that's for the next one.
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