Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 19, 1995 TAG: 9511170117
SECTION: BOOK PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY PAUL DELLINGER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
One test of the quality of a genre book might be to take away the elements that make it a mystery, fantasy, science-fiction story or whatever has drawn a particular reader to it. Take away those genre elements and see if what's left is still interesting.
"The Land of Nod" would pass such a test with flying colors.
Its classification would probably have to be horror, but it is more a coming-of-age novel with a universality recognizable to any reader who can still remember what it was like to be young and on the verge of that transition from childhood to adolescence. Clements has tapped into experiences common to us all, and turned them to his own story purposes.
Lawyer Jeffry Dittimore is divorced from his wife, worried about his daughter and married to his job. But his performance at work is starting to be affected by nightmares about his childhood, nightmares which prompt him to take a leave of absence and return to the small California town of his childhood - the town where he and his gang of friends acted out imaginary games from cowboys to soldiers to invaders from outer space.
Jeffry is the group's leader, of sorts, but Timmy Kegler, the kid from across the tracks who is just different enough from his peers to be ostracized outside his little group of friends, is far more imaginative. It is Timmy who invents most of the games, who half-convinces the other boys that their school janitor is an emissary from the planet Venus, who leads them on a challenge to climb the Big Tree that sits like an aberration at the edge of their neighborhood. It is also Timmy who claims to have discovered a land out of place and time, accessible somehow via the Big Tree, where childhood games can continue forever ...
A crisis erupts when Jeffry and one of the other boys become interested in organized sports and, even worse, girls. There is a rift between the traditional Jeffry and the dreamer Timmy, the latter seeing himself being left behind and alone. Anyone who can still remember the loneliness of childhood when school classmates divided summer friends from one another, or when it seemed one's closest acquaintances no longer shared your interests will sympathize with him, even though Timmy is the villain of the piece.
Because Timmy and one of the other boys, it seems, disappeared one strange night and were never seen again - except in Jeffry's nightmares. The book alternates between scenes past and present, each heading for its own climax, and Clements balances these elements in fine style.
Jeffry finds that he can indeed go home again but, once there, he must confront what seemed to be nightmares but which turn out to be all too horrifyingly real.
Paul Dellinger reports on Pulaski from Southwest Virginia.
by CNB