No one in town wants to associate with, touch or even look upon a Barker.

The Barkers are shunned in this small Virginia town and try to live out a quiet existence in their mountain home. SINEATER starts with the birth of Joel, the newest member of the Barker family whose patriarch is the sineater-the person who eats from the dead in order to absorb their sins. Her words create images that have stayed with me long after reading SINEATER. Massie demonstrates some of the finest writing talent I've seen in a long time. I wish I'd waited and got a hardback edition.Įxcellent. That said, I was very impressed with the fact that the action sequences are unusually well-done and, occasionally, exciting.I read this novel straight through in one sitting and would recommend it to just about anyone, horror fan or no. The true story lies in the way in which the town is dealing with their own changing traditions. This is a novel of human interactions and reactions, a novel about people. The characterizations were strong and even her touches on the minor characters leave the reader feeling like they are actual people with full lives outside of their small parts in the unfolding story.The plot is a bit slow and wanders off track in a few places, but this book is not about the plot. Reading this novel I had a definite feel for exactly what things looked like, how they felt, and how they smelled. Massie's writing style is evocative and vivid without becoming florid. Sineater, however, is a daimond in the rough. The problem with genre fiction is that so much of it is cruft.

Sineater by Elizabeth Massie