Helpful Score: 2
This a great horror story. Lots of twists and turns.
Helpful Score: 1
I bought this book for $1 at a used book store and wasn't expecting much. I was happily surprised though. It was a good little story about a town that has not had rain in 4 years and one of the residents hires a rainmaker. Good storytelling and rounding out of the characters by the author. I will be looking for her other novel to read as well.
Helpful Score: 1
[From Library Journal] The farming town of Goodlands, North Dakota, has suffered through four years of drought, with one farm after another falling to the auctioneer's gavel. Then a stranger comes to town...a rainmaker...and the stage is set for a confrontation with the subterranean force that is punishing the people of Goodlands for the sins of their ancestors. It starts with small things: a driveway cracks in two, fences are cut --- but soon a dry, dark dust rises from the sere soil of Goodlands and takes possession of first one, then another young woman's will.
[Entertainment Weekly] Moloney intertwines powerful psychological, supernatural, and sexual undercurrents--making Dry Spells an absorbing rainy afternoon read!
[Entertainment Weekly] Moloney intertwines powerful psychological, supernatural, and sexual undercurrents--making Dry Spells an absorbing rainy afternoon read!
Helpful Score: 1
From Booklist
Goodlands, North Dakota, is enduring its fourth year of drought when Tom Keatley, rainmaker, saunters into town. Although Tom is a drifter, somehow he got the letter town banker Karen Grange sent him after seeing a TV clip of him at work. He camps out near Karen's place just as all hell--fires, sabotaged water tanks, crevasses opening in the middle of roads, huge trees falling so as to create maximum damage--breaks loose. The vengeful spirit of a woman raped and murdered by a town father decades ago is on the rampage. The spirit's hatred is behind Goodlands' dry spell, too, but everything comes round right after a final showdown between it and Tom. Meanwhile, Moloney pads a simple plot with persuasive, subsidiary rural characterizations and with incidents that betray aspirations to the King's RowPeyton Place, small-town-scandal subgenre as much as to dark fantasy. Occasionally, Moloney seems to strive for even greater literary distinction, and then the yarn reads like a blend of Stephen King and Jane Smiley.
Goodlands, North Dakota, is enduring its fourth year of drought when Tom Keatley, rainmaker, saunters into town. Although Tom is a drifter, somehow he got the letter town banker Karen Grange sent him after seeing a TV clip of him at work. He camps out near Karen's place just as all hell--fires, sabotaged water tanks, crevasses opening in the middle of roads, huge trees falling so as to create maximum damage--breaks loose. The vengeful spirit of a woman raped and murdered by a town father decades ago is on the rampage. The spirit's hatred is behind Goodlands' dry spell, too, but everything comes round right after a final showdown between it and Tom. Meanwhile, Moloney pads a simple plot with persuasive, subsidiary rural characterizations and with incidents that betray aspirations to the King's RowPeyton Place, small-town-scandal subgenre as much as to dark fantasy. Occasionally, Moloney seems to strive for even greater literary distinction, and then the yarn reads like a blend of Stephen King and Jane Smiley.
