Tough call between four and five stars. Settled on four for reasons below.

Ambitious TV Newsman Robert Londrigan just had a bad argument with his pregnant wife over a sensationalized news story about a severely handicapped infant. It's Halloween and he's sitting in the park trying to cool off from the argument. He had a few drinks on an empty stomach and now he's feeling pretty remorseful. But even as he prepares to head home to apologize, his universe is going to start to become permanently unhinged. He's going to have exactly 37 days to deal with it, and we're strapped in for the ride.

Part Gaiman, part Barker, Braunbeck has bigger things than the average fright-fest he wants to deal with here, but we're in for one wild ride before he shows us where he's going. A for characters and plot, the major failing is Braunbeck's prose just isn't quite up to the task of the things he's trying to deal with here. A more evocative writer like Barker could have soared with this where Braunbeck merely flies. In the end the stunning vision of the thing keeps it in the air. He keeps us wondering just what exactly is going on for a good 2/3 of the novel as poor nice guy Robert gets bounced here and there seemingly at random. You literally have no idea what is coming next for most of the novel and that is the key to its page-turning pacing. Once I was hooked I just had to see what was going to happen next.

Tag line: Do you despair? ( )

I had a hard time finishing this book, which is why my review is so late, I left it many times. I feel like it was all over the place, the story would start to get good then go off on another tangent and like the author had so much they wanted to put in there they couldn't decide where to start and end. I love horror books but this one just didn't do it for me. ( )

***If you like Horror Novels – please read my review before using my low Star rating to affect your choice about reading this! If you don’t like Horror Novels – skip this book and you can probably skip my review too!***
I received this in E-Book form from the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program. I am not a fan of this genre and to be honest, I would never have read this if it had not been given to me free (in return for a review). In that respect, it helped remind me why I do not care for this genre. I am also not a fan of electronic books (which is the form I received this in), call me old fashioned, but I like actual books.
The prerequisites noted, I should talk about the story.
I did not feel it appropriate to lowball a score because *I* do not care for the whole genre. This is not the fault of the author, however, I did not care for this book. If you really like horror stories along the lines of hardcore Stephen King – then this is probably for you.
There is a TON (way more than there needed to be) of graphic images of the most bizarre birth defects known to the species all wrapped into one book. I am a healthcare worker with a neonatal/pediatric specialty. I have been to hundreds of births and the reality is, birth defects of this magnitude are the type of things a practitioner sees once or twice in a whole career, yet this author would have you believe these kids are hanging out on every corner, undiscovered. These children would rarely survive to birth and then, they would not last much longer. Certainly, the magnitude of the deformities would not allow these children to live long enough to grow or learn to communicate. I have a personal beef with the author for some things he wrote about a ventilator on a patient – I wish he had consulted a friendly neighborhood respiratory therapist before publishing this because it leads readers to misunderstand both how and why ventilators work but also what powers the machines. (I *still* do not know where the second set of tubing came from or was attached to – both the machine end and the patient end, it didn’t make any sense, but a non-healthcare person might not realize it.)
The second group of children mentioned in this book are abused children. Not just any abused kids, but the most severely abused. While I appreciate the need to bring light to the plight of young people in bad situations, I do not read fiction to be reminded of things I could read about in the newspaper. I feel like the book tried to do too much; pick a set of kids in trouble and stick with it – you do not need to cram every child in the world (ever born, ever) into a single book.
This story is disjointed and turbulent. A man loses his pregnant wife but she is only *sort of* gone. There is, apparently, a second plane of time-space that she is now hanging out on. The story is his journey of discovery of this plane and his voyage to join her and their child.
There is unnecessary and oddly placed violence; not just gratuitous sex, but gratuitous incest (think about that for a minute), a massive amount of pain and suffering of babies who are essentially dead (normally, these children would be dead, therefore past suffering, but this author has them hanging on in a failed attempt to show *hope* - I thought it was pretty cruel not to allow them dignified deaths).
You know that somehow the main character is going to live happily ever after, well, as happy as one can be in this hot mess, but it took FOREVER to get there. And there were some weird side tracks that seemed completely unnecessary (what was the point of a basement full of dead bodies? This could have been conveyed to the reader with a lot less effort on both the author and the reader’s parts).
I finished this book in record (slow) time. I had to force myself to finish it, but as it was a LibraryThing Review copy, I had obligated myself to it. I want to believe that most of my personal issue with the book had to do with it being a genre I do not care for, but to be honest, the book was also 100 pages too long. I found a great deal of the dialog odd and juvenile. The story was not linear and as a reader, I found I had to put up with a lot of U-Turns that should not have taken place. We were continually being sent in reverse in, “oh, and I forgot to tell you this – you need this information for the story to make sense” circles. The truth is, I shouldn’t fault this, as it is how I personally tell stories and I know it makes others a little crazy to listen to me sometimes; but I am an ordinary human, not a published author, and I would put more effort into flow and linearity if I expected someone to actually purchase my prose.
So – while I did not care for the book, it is hard to tell where my dislike of the genre and the author’s efforts were at fault – with this in mind, I am giving the book half the stars I can. I *do* believe the author poured his heart into the work and his effort deserves appreciation. Literature is Art. Some people like Abstract, some people like Cubism, some people like Still Lives. Just because you don’t like one type does not mean the artist is bad, it is just not to your taste. I do not want to punish this author for producing an Abstract that I just don’t “get”. ( )

I received this book from Library Thing Early Reviewers in exchange for an honest review. I found this book to be deeply disturbing! I was pregnant and have a baby daughter. I shuddered when I read about the baby and what happened to her corpse. This novel had many twists and turns. I was not expecting the direction it went. In the beginning,you will be lost, but stick with the book till the end and everything will fall into place. Warning: This novel is not people with a weak stomach. There are scenes of corpse mutilation. This book is only for the strongest of horror fans. ( )

The present novel, "In Silent Graves," by Gary Braunbeck, is one that I found at first interesting, but rather repetitive and lackluster as I progressed. The premise (which can be found elsewhere) seemed to be unique, and the author was able to craft a story unlike others I have read. Of note, Braunbeck has a true gift for conveying emotion in the text. With an emphasis on the beginning chapters, the author was able to describe such despair and sadness that I found myself moved by the plight of the main character. However, I found that there is only so much sadness one can be exposed to before a book needs to take a different turn. In general, I felt the storyline was fairly basic, and it lost my attention after the first one hundred pages. Because of the shallow plot line, I cannot recommend this book to others. However, do keep watch for other novels by this author-- while Silent Graves may have failed to impress, it was clear the author has a gift for writing, and future books should be considered on those merits. ( )