Beneath Still Waters By Matthew J. Costello

Beneath Still Waters
By Matthew J. Costello
1989 Berkley
Paperback, 266 pages

                It sucks to try to review a book the day after you finish it and you really don’t remember much about it. This one is a slog to recall. Admittedly, I only wanted to read it in the first place because of the cool (uncredited) cover art.

 

                Perhaps taking a cue from Guy N. Smith’s Demons published the previous year, this one is about the small, evacuated New York town of Gouldens Falls that is flooded to make a new reservoir. Just prior to the flooding, two local boys hop the fence to explore the abandoned buildings. One disappears and when the other one looks for him, he’s almost caught by some sinister people that have grabbed his friend. Something fishy was going on and he runs to safety. Fifty years later, in the present, journalist Dan Elliot wants to do a piece on the buried town so he visits nearby Ellerton and gets more than he bargained for when people go missing in the lake. Even two divers who were looking for a drowning victim don’t come up. Local journalist Susan Sloan is also interested in the big story. Plus, her daughter Claire is having watery nightmares.

 

                Or something like that. There is plenty going on for the length of this novel but none of it is very exciting and the scary bad guys are ill-defined and seem somewhat glossed over. Save for Claire, no character really gets into your heart enough to give a shit. Admittedly, I read this fairly quickly because it always felt like something important was about to happen but it never did. The crack in the dam discovered mid-way telegraphed the obvious climactic action way too soon. (That is not a spoiler in any way. Even the back cover tells you the problem.) The horror elements are weak and the whole thing just seemed like a wasted premise to me. (And GNS’s Demons, the sequel to Deathbell (1980), did the flooded town thing so much  better!)

 

                There are few good moments, like when the rescue divers, and later on Dan, are under the water searching the flooded town in dim light, searching for bodies (or in Dan’s case, clues to the mysterious happenings). Costello manages to write the slow-motion, drifting scenery rather vividly and it creates a few chills. But other than that, I didn’t get much satisfaction from this one. Not a keeper for me.