1 / 5 Stars
Founded in 1991 as the publisher of the popular 'World of Darkness' (WoD) franchise of tabletop role-playing games, White Wolf earned sufficient revenue to expand into publishing books in the fields of 'dark fantasy' and horror. Although the Paperbacks from Hell boom was losing momentum by mid-decade, White Wolf continued issuing books (primarily novelizations of WoD content) until 2006, when it was bought by another gaming company.
White Wolf was notorious for having awful covers on their books. In an essay titled 'Just the Covers,' posted to the long-since defunct 'SF Site,' by former bookstore manager Rick Klaw, White Wolf covers could be 'ugly' and 'indecipherable,' which are bad things in terms of trying to sell books..........
''Cage of Night' was published by White Wolf in 1996. The cover design is by Larry S. Friedman. This novel is an expansion of a story, 'The Brasher Girl,' Gorman first published in a 1995 hardcover, small-press anthology titled 'Cages.'
'Cage' is 286 pages long, but a quick read; the pages are center-justified, in large type, and double-spaced.
This novel has one of the lamest premises of the Paperbacks from Hell era: a centuries-old malevolent alien (?) living at the bottom of a well (?) somehow telepathically coerces a small town's homecoming queen into seducing lovestruck young men, and then forcing these young men to commit violent crimes- !
Yeah..........
'Cage' takes place in the early 1990s in a small Midwestern town. The first-person protagonist, Spence, is twenty-one years old and returning to his hometown after a stint in the Army. Spence still is young enough to attend keggers put on by the high school kids, but when he starts community college, he'll be aging out of the local scene and into an uncertain adulthood.
Spence meets, and becomes head-over-heels in love with, the homecoming queen, Cindy Brasher. A late bloomer and something of a nerd, Spence is thrilled to be dating the hottest chick in town. Even if so doing earns him the enmity of her former boyfriend, a thug who likes to use violence to solve his problems.
For all her beauty and sweetness, Cindy is a troubled girl. She spent time in a psychiatric facility. And she insists on showing Spence the old well in the woods outside of town. Cindy says there is an alien in the well. When they visit the well, Spence hears what sounds like a voice emanating from the well, speaking to him.
Spence isn't sure what, exactly, he has heard. But he soon learns that Cindy has brought other boys to the well, and those boys wound up doing things that they shouldn't have done. Is Spence the latest in a line of boys who somehow have been suborned into........ Evil ?!
'Cage of Night' not very good. It's true that Gorman is a skilled prose stylist, putting lots of Stephen King-ish interior monologues and pop culture allusions about small town life into the narrative. But the plotting just gets more contrived with each successive page. As a protagonist, Spence is remarkably dumb, and reading yet another passage in which he moons over Cindy, and refuses to accept the obvious, gets very stale very quickly.
The novel's ending has a flaccid quality that does little to redeem one's plowing through the preceding eight chapters.
This is one Paperback from Hell that even the most devoted fans of the genre are going to want to avoid.
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