Tapping into fears about rising neo-Nazi activity around the world, Monteleone (The Blood of the Lamb) presents a story peppered with harrowing images. It's 1999 when New York psychiatrist Michael Keating notices something odd in his own patients and in reports in the medical literature: people of various races and religions are experiencing horrifyingly vivid past-life memories of dying in Holocaust death camps. Each account shares one detail, of der Klein Engel-The Little Angel-a Jewish capo in the concentration camps who lived for the death and torture of his fellow prisoners. Keating realizes that the Little Angel has been reincarnated, and that the lives of his former victims are in danger again. The book starts off strong, interweaving chilling past-life scenes with present-time reports of mysterious deaths around the world in which tiny, tattooed numbers suddenly appear on the victims' wrists. Monteleone drops interesting characters in and out of the story, however, and Keating proves too introspectively cerebral to be a unifying focus and a satisfying hero. The stories of the prey and their predator keep pace to provide an engaging ride up to a predictable confrontation between good and evil-an ending that barely justifies exploiting the historical reality of the Holocaust for fantasy-driven goosebumps and thrills. (Mar.)
After Manhattan psychiatrist J. Michael Keating rescues a suicidal young woman wielding a gun, he discovers that she is part of a puzzling phenomenon. Average citizens all over the world have begun suffering blackouts and vivid nightmares of death at Nazi extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka. When Keating and his assistant-turned-lover Pamela connect with Rabbi Irwin Klingerman, who has amassed research on the unusual memories, the three plan a symposium for the "reincarnated." An eerie similarity permeates everyone's memories: a sadistic, ghoulish man known only as Der kleine Engel. At the symposium in New York City, the group faces recycled horror as evil personified erupts and seeks a showdown with Good. This Jesuit-educated author of The Resurrectionist (LJ 11/15/95) has a gift for complex characters. For most public library collections, particularly where Christian fiction circulates well.-Susan A. Zappia, Maricopa Cty. Lib. Dist., Phoenix
If nothing else, the coming Millennium is beginning to offer us some proof that inventive writers can create new mythologies. With Night of Broken Souls, Thomas F. Monteleone offers us an original vision of evil. His last two novels proved him a master of possibly the soundest starting point of speculative writing -- "What if...?" In Blood of the Lamb he asked "What if Jesus Christ was cloned?" With The Resurrectionist he explored "What if a charismatic politician were granted the power to raise the dead?" In the new Night of Broken Souls we have the "what if" of this century's most indelible real evil, the Nazis, returning.
Monteleone, as we have come to expect, creates believable characters that draw the reader into fast-paced, well-plotted narrative written in a deceptively simple dark style. Although the book is cast as a thriller, it deals with the battle of Good versus Evil as much as Stephen King does in The Stand.
From the multiple viewpoints of Monteleone's characters -- a cabby, an audio technician, a homemaker, a self-made businesswoman, a secret agent -- we glimpse nightmares in which they all remember dying in the Holocaust, sadistically tortured by Der Klein Engel, a Jewish minion of the monster Mengele. None of the terrified dreamers are Jewish and none were born before World War II. All are experiencing bizarre blackouts.
Psychiatrist Dr. J. Michael Keating begins to discover more than synchronicity as patients describe these disturbances. The work of a federally funded Ph.D. uncovers the sickening reality behind the dreams and an FBI agent and a rabbi discover that the dreamers are being shockingly and systematically killed, each with a death-camp tattoo appearing on the bodies.
Nazis? Haven't we played that tune enough? Not when a writer like Monteleone examines the idea. He gives us a new way in which to be disturbed by something that already scares us and then tells us the story effectively enough to make it all seem hideously new.
With his episodic style, Monteleone allows the reader just enough information and terror to keep the ropes of fascination tight. Night of Broken Souls offers the immediacy of a news flash while rendering a horror that deeply threatens one's psyche. The "seductive and poisonous logic of evil" can, the author intimates, entrap any of us. Call it what you like, but this is the kind of horror that stays with the reader. Slickly entertaining as it is, it indelibly etches itself onto ones' soul.
— horroronline.com
Monteleone's 21st supernatural suspenser (The Resurrectionist, 1995, etc.) is his best-plotted and most effective in several years. Many psychiatrists have noticed a similarity in the nightmares of their patients. These terrified people, it seems, have been invaded by the reincarnated souls of Nazi death camp victims, reliving the childhoods of Polish or Czech victims, their arrests, deportation to Auschwitz, and eventual gassing. While Monteleone's sketches of that death camp will give many readers their own déjà vu about Sophie's Choice and Schindler's List, his standard ploy of introducing the CIA as the villain midway need not be feared: The story's main antagonist, a CIA hit man, is introduced right at the start. Like most of the other victims, Harford Nichols, the CIA assassin, has been experiencing blackouts and waking up in far-distant places, having assassinated people completely unknown to him. Once recovered by the Agency, Nichols is placed under the care of Dr. Isabella Mussina, who induces past-life recall through hypnosis. Nichols turns out to be harboring the soul of Hirsh Dukor, a blood-mad Jew who became the right-hand assistant of Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz. Once his recall has been brought forward full force, Nichols becomes Dukor, attacks Dr. Mussina, escapes to Manhattan and sets about plotting to rid the world of Jews, determined that the planet will enter the millennium with a one-world Nazi-styled dictatorship. Meanwhile, also in Manhattan, Dr. Michael Keating is dealing with several patients who have painful, troubling memories of past lives. Putting his files together with Dr. Mussina's, he decides that the best way to foil Dukor is togather all the reincarnated victims together in New York, focusing their power against that of the lethal Dukor/Nichols. Then begin—whoosh!—the special effects.
Swift, strongly meshed plot elements speed you through an ingenious gripper.
