Forever Will You Suffer

Can true love conquer an onslaught of horrors that includes a taxi-driving zombie and flesh-rending spiderlike monsters? Readers will find themselves sorely challenged to stick with this scattershot spooker long enough to find out. Events kick into overdrive in the opening pages as bookstore clerk Rich Summers is hijacked by a reanimated corpse from the cemetery where he has been visiting the graves of his mother and sister and deposited at the home of Katarina, a former girlfriend. Katarina is missing, and shortly after Rich finds this out from her new lover, Meggan, the house morphs into another dimension where replays of grim events from distant pasts and alternate realities regularly occur. Frank writes with admirable energy, but the relentlessly escalating weirdness of his story leaves little room for development of characters or plot. As a result, this debut novel plays out like a feature-length B-movie horror trailer: intriguing, fast-paced, but unfulfilling. (Feb.)