Review: Cry for the Strangers

Cry for the Strangers by John Saul
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Generally speaking, if you've read one John Saul novel you've pretty much read all his early works as they pretty much follow the same theme: bad thing happens (usually involving the deaths of children), and then years later history repeats itself, with children dying in the same manner as before.

This book was slightly different: taking place in the fictional Clark's Harbor, Washington instead of the usual east coast, the victims in this one were adults instead of children - always "strangers" to the town, and usually "claimed" by the sea and it's frequent storms. Strangers, in this case, meaning they weren't born in Clark's Harbor; how long they lived there was irrelevant.

Written in 1979, I felt this book held up fairly well over time. There were a couple of instances in which details were dated: customers throwing "a couple of dollars" on the table to cover their bar tabs and a couple of homes without electricity most notably. However, in some of the smaller coastal towns, it does look and feel like time stopped so that was easy to overlook.

I wouldn't say this book was scary per se, but it definitely held my attention and did quicken my heartbeat in a couple of places but it didn't terrify me, probably because I read a lot of his books as a teenager and lived to tell about it. My biggest issue with the book was trying to determine where exactly Clark's Harbor was supposed to be that was three hours away from Seattle yet not Portland! (Accounting for speed limit laws in 1979 vs today did help in this respect).

Overall, the book does follow Saul's usual formula of bad thing, passage of time, repeat bad thing with the foreshadowing that bad thing will happen again. The characters are interchangeable with his other novels that follow this same formula but Saul did do a great job of distinguishing the small town mentality of who and who doesn't belong from that of the outsiders who were trying to make Clark's Harbor home but didn't fit in simply due to their family not having lived there for generations. Some have said it didn't hold up over time, I felt it did.

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