John Saul

I tried reading "Nathaniel" when I was younger and I didn't like it. I remember being creeped out by the cover of "Suffer the Children" my folks had lying around when I was a kid.

I remember his books were big when I was a kid. My cousin recommended Suffer the Children because it was a really creepy story about an evil child, but all I remember is a scene where said kid had eaten a lot of chalk at school and started vomiting it all up over her mom in the car. I don't think it pulled me in. Maybe I was a bit too young.

And yes, the cover was really creepy. A doll with empty eyes or something, wasn't it. Wax dolls hit my uncanny valley anyway.

I didn't know he was still writing or in print, but that might show how not up with the horror genre I am these days.

My folks' copy had a baby girl doll with a broken face on the cover -- try coming across that when you're six!

I liked his stories, a lot, but after a while I just couldn't read any more. Reached my creepy max, I think.

Yeah, The Manhattan Hunt Club is the only one of his that I've read. I read it, gee, maybe twelve or fifeen years ago when I was elementary school, and I remember really liking it. I've been needing to look at the rest of his books.

I haven't seen where any unusual number of horror readers are down on him. His numbers sure don't show it. Many dislike every horror writer out there, including King. Who cares? That's normal. The question is only whether a writer sells enough to stay in print, and whether or not YOU like him.

I didn't know whether he was still writing, or not. I haven't seen a new book of his in several years.

Anyway, complaining about Saul is like complaining about King. Whatever any individual thinks, he has enough fans to keep him on the bestseller list, and he's living the life all the naysayers would love to have.

I've seen/heard people shamefully admit they like him too! Or confess that they USED to like him, like they are too mature now. And I can see why writers *might* get down on him. I guess he's not the most sophisticated horror writer...but I enjoy some of his stuff. I wonder if it's a case of snobs being snobs. I'm curious what specifically people don't like about him.

I just googled John Saul just to make sure I don't mistake him for Peter Straub who wrote Ghost Story, which I enjoyed. But I definitely remember reading Comes the Blind Fury, Hellfire and Punish the Sinners. They were all books my mom read but beyond those three, I don't remember reading anything else of his because as a kid then, reading about kid ghosts and all that, I'd reached my creepy max meter as well and after my mom started taking us with her to see even creepier movies, I was just about done.

He belongs to the original new wave of horror novelists that started in the 1970's, together with Stephen King, James Herbert, Graham Masterton, Charles L Grant, Robert McCammon, Ramsey Campbell, Peter Straub, Peter Benchley, William Blatty, and Dean Koontz.
These were guys who took the tropes of weird fiction and B sci-fi and fused them with the modern fat thriller novel framework (which had itself only arrived on the scene about two decades earlier, by uniting the tropes of the pulp adventure with the mechanics of the 19th century novel), and it's not surprising that by today some of them fell away, or declined in popularity, or died. What's surprising is how almost half a century later some of them are still here and still the leaders--King, Straub, Koontz... The immortal bunch.
Concerning the actual question, Saul is in the lower end of my top dozen, tied with Shaun Hutson

I've read a couple of his stories back in the day and they were okay. Didn't blow me over for some reason, but they were readable. At the time, I thought of him as a "poor man's Dean Koontz" which is probably grossly unfair, but that was my take at the time. I've seen plenty of his novels on the shelf and always skip over them, probably because I wasn't all that thrilled with what I read before. However, every once in a while I'm tempted, just that something else always comes up I want to read more. One day, I'll probably try him again. I have no idea if he's still writing or not.