Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #65772 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Morrell takes a creative kind of breaking-and-entering as the premise for his latest thriller (after Nightscape), a gripping story that demands to be read in a single sitting. Disguising himself as a journalist, Frank Balenger, ex-U.S. Army Ranger and Iraqi war veteran, joins a group of "Creepers," also known as infiltrators, urban explorers or city speleologists—men and women who outfit themselves with caving gear to break into and explore buildings that have long been closed up and abandoned. Though what they're doing is technically illegal, participants pride themselves on never stealing or destroying anything they find at these sites. They take only photographs and aim to leave no footprints. Balenger joins a group of four: the leader, Professor Robert Conklin, high school teacher Vincent Vanelli and graduate students Rick and Cora Magill. This gang infiltrates the Paragon Hotel, an abandoned, seven-story, pyramidal Asbury Park, N.J., structure built in 1901 by eccentric, hemophiliac Morgan Carlisle. Balenger and the professor have a special agenda, but the others are there simply for the thrills. Things quickly begin to unravel in life-threatening ways once the intrepid infiltrators penetrate the building—they aren't the only ones creeping around the spooky hotel. Morrell delivers first-rate, suspenseful storytelling once again.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Frank Balenger is a New York Times reporter doing a Sunday magazine profile on urban explorers, better known as creepers. It's an illegal activity but a very popular one, in which adventure seekers invade crumbling old structures in search of thrills and perhaps a glimpse of the past. Frank joins a team of four as they prepare to enter the long-shuttered and mysterious Paragon Hotel. They surreptitiously enter as darkness envelops the city, planning to emerge before dawn none the worse for wear. At least that's the plan. Initially they encounter the expected assortment of crumbling furniture, magazines, and rats, but soon they realize they are not alone, and their counterparts are not friendly people. It turns out that Frank's group has a hidden agenda involving treasure, and their rivals are after the same loot. Throw in an even more unfriendly kidnapper and his captor, and you have a nightmare in the making. Veteran thriller writer Morrell gleefully and shamelessly cherry picks from several genres (crime, horror, adventure, western) and blends them into a violent, claustrophobic nightmare. There's the survive-the-night-in-a-haunted-house plot starring a Norman Bates villain; there's a Treasure of the Sierra Madre cast that would rather die than give up the loot; and there's a version of the classic western in which the outlaws and the homesteaders join forces to battle the Indians. An unabashedly entertaining thriller that has blockbuster movie written all over it. Wes Lukowsky
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"Chilling and hypnotically readable!" -- Stephen King

"If you’re reading Morrell, you’re sitting on the edge of your seat." -- Michael Connelly

"It’s been years since I've read a thriller as good as Creepers." -- Douglas Preston, co-author with Lincoln Child of Brimstone and Dance of Death

Customer Reviews

Spoilers Ahead!!!!
Urban Exploration.
People who break into closed or abandoned buildings and creep around in the dark.
Sounds like the making of a great book, right? Especially in the capable hands of a master like David Morrell...i mean, this guy created John Freaking Rambo, for crying out loud!!!!!

CREEPERS is a pretty lean book.....It starts off running, as Reporter Frank Balenger meets up with a quartet of Creepers who are preparing to break into the long-abandoned Paragon Hotel, in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Before long, the group are in over their heads, with mutant rats, five-legged cats, secret passages, collapsing staircases, and long-buried secrets that should have stayed buried. Then, at about the 120 page mark, Morrell must have been having a bout of insomnia and surfed over to TBS and caught the old Ice Cube/Ice T Urban Explorer thriller TRESPASS, because Morrell changes the focus from determined-group-of-amateurs-in-over-their-heads to HOLY-CRAP, CRAZY-MURDEROUS-THUGS-ARE-HERE-TO STEAL-THE-HIDDEN-TREASURE, and it really took the book from fresh and new to utterly predictable, at least for me. Then, just as you start wondering "How the hell is he going to drag this out for another hundred pages??", Morrell takes yet another twist, this time for the better, by adding still another murderous psycho to the mix. (He also crafts one of the creepiest scenes I've ever read, as a character is silently decapitated, while the others are mere feet away, totally unaware. Brrrr......)

The book is well-written, without a doubt, but gets harder and harder to swallow as it goes on. Coincidence piles upon coincidence until credibility isn't just stretched, it's snapped and left lying there in pieces. The hero is a reporter. But then again, he's also a Gulf War veteran. But wait, he's also a former Detective!!! And if you order now, he'll also be searching for his long-missing wife, whose corpse just happens to be in the hotel, along with the man who killed her!
It's all a little much to ask a reader to swallow.

CREEPERS is a fun read, kind of like Richard Laymon when he was really running on all cylinders, but my throat still hurts from everything Mr. Morrell asked me to swallow.

Review
A team of creepers otherwise known as urban explorers are gearing up for their next expedition to the famous Paragon Hotel. The group consists of Robert Conkin, a professor of history at the State University in Buffalo, Vincent Vanelli, high school teacher, Cora and Rick Magill both graduates from State University, and last but not least is Frank Balenger, a reporter with the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

The Paragon Hotel was designed by Morgan Carlisle, who was a very wealthy man. Once inside the hotel the group starts running into some very bizarre and strange things including mutated critters. Beware those that go bump in the night.

When I first read the summary for this book I thought this might be an ok work of fiction. It only took me reading a little ways into this book and I was hooked. David Morrell turned Creepers into a hauntingly, spine-tingling good old fashion horror novel. I found it spooky how each room in the hotel kept getting scarier and scarier; bring the group closer to the evil that dwells in the Paragon Hotel. I would read another book by Mr. Morrell.

First book in a long time I couldn't put down!
There are plenty of long reviews, so I'll be brief. This book sat in my stack of books to read for well over a year, and after buying the sequel I figured it was time to pick it up...and I'm thrilled I did. This is one of the fastest reads I've seen in a long time. It was almost impossible to put down. Don't look for anything 'deep' as some of the author's other works tend to get, but this is a fun, rollercoaster page turner.