Richie Tankersley Cusick, The Unseen 1: It Begins
The Unseen 2: Rest in Peace
(Speak Books, 2003)
Lucy is a moody teenager who moves to a quiet suburban town called Pine Ridge when her mother dies. She comes to live with her aunt Irene and her even moodier cousin Angela. Lucy is already unhappy enough with this arrangement when walking home one night, she becomes convinced that someone is following her. Ducking into a cemetery, she falls into an open grave, and finds herself face to face with another teenage girl who has just been violently murdered. With her dying breath, the girl in the grave passes some kind of psychic power onto Lucy, who finds herself being stalked by some malevolent force or being.
Clearly aimed at the early teen set, The Unseen is told in a very straightforward style. The language is frank and direct, and not a whole lot of attention is paid to descriptive detail. Cusick seems to be almost exclusively concerned with keeping the plot moving. Luckily, there's a fair amount of plot, although the cast of characters at times feels so small as to make the novel almost claustrophobic. Lucy has struggles with her cousin, who at times is an unwitting – or unwilling – ally. She also meets a local boy who has his own brushes with the paranormal. There's a Catholic priest who may or may not be what he seems (on this point, I have no idea, since nothing is really revealed about "Father Matt" in this first half of the series), and the local "strange girl," Dakota, who turns out to be very sympathetic to Lucy's plight, and, in some ways, is a more interesting character than Lucy herself.
I don't really know what more to say about this story. It kept the pages moving, and while some plot twists were actually surprising, others were not surprising in the least. I'm curious about how the story turns out, but even so, reading it was never really an engaging experience, even though I could see easily how it could have been. Some more plausible character actions, for example, as opposed to characters doing things that frankly make little sense except as a means to propel the story. Less attention paid to relentless pacing and more to character and atmosphere, perhaps.
Reading The Unseen, I caught glimpses of a really good horror novel lurking around the edges. It's not a bad read, by any means, but I must honestly conclude that it's not nearly as good as it could have been.
