New Book Alert: The Caller: A Demon Within by Jeanie Creviston; Strong Suspenseful Beginning Cannot Make Up For Overstuffed Ending

New Book Alert: The Caller: A Demon Within by Jeanie Creviston; Strong Suspenseful Beginning Cannot Make Up For Overstuffed Ending

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews



Spoilers: As disappointed as I get with books that start badly and stay that way, I am even more so with books that start well but have bad endings. They have so much promise going in that it becomes an even worse disappointment when they fizzle out before the words "The End" appear.


Take Jeanie Creviston's thriller The Caller: A Demon Within. It starts out as an excellent psychological thriller using points of view from the serial killer, the victim, and the law enforcement officer. Then it becomes overstuffed with demonic possession and one too many false leads that confuse the Reader and leaves the plot going in too many directions.


The book focuses on Tom Biddle, a New Jersey cop, who is one of the many police officers searching for a rapist/serial killer. They arrest a potential suspect, David Hernandez who manipulates a fight between the officers and himself. Trying to break up the fight, Tom accidentally drops a photograph of his former fiancee, Sydnie. David is instantly drawn to the woman in the photo and when he manages to get released from custody, he heads over to Indiana where Sydnie now lives with her husband and daughters.


The Caller starts strong with an intriguing chase. The alternating points of view are solid. David is a very spine tingling antagonist of the Hannibal Lector variety. He is able to control the situation with icy mind games and extraordinary persistence. In one passage, he manipulates a fellow prisoner to confessing to the murders and then committing suicide.

He also has a predatory instinct on how to circle his chosen prey before he loses control and kills them. He tracks a chiropractor by pretending to be a patient, then trails her to her place before going in for the literal kill. He is someone who believes that because of his intelligence and process in capturing his victims that he can never be caught.


Tom by contrast is not as self-assured and much more flawed. It was a mistake to leave a photograph in the presence of a potential assailant, one that he rues throughout the rest of the book. As compared to his toxic masculine father, Tom is a more sensitive sort. He is clearly protective towards the victims, particularly Sydnie. Even though, he parted ways with her, he is still in love with her and so concerned about her welfare that he crosses state lines to save her life.


The other interesting aspect to the novel is how it deals with Sydnie. She is a strong willed woman who is deeply in love with her husband, Ed, and involved in her daughter's lives. She is the type of person that you can't imagine bad things happening to. It becomes terrifying when she starts getting frightening calls from New Jersey and the calls get closer and closer to where she lives.

While Sydnie is the target, she is also very protective of her home and family. So much so that she is able to take on her stalker with assistance from friends and family and minimal help from Tom (In a refreshing twist on the whole " male cop saves female victim" trope, Tom isn't even there during the final confrontation, leaving Sydnie to move center stage as the hero in the story.)

Sydnie is also psychic which gives her the advantage to know that danger is coming. She is also able to get flashes into David's psyche to see the once abused child and learn how he became a killer.


Sydnie's psychic abilities aren't the only supernatural aspects to the novel and that's where the problems lay. What started out as a realistic psychological thriller becomes disjointed when it is revealed that a demonic presence is around. There is very little foreshadowing of that beforehand and the little that there is could have been attributed to David's unstable mind and thought process. The demonic presence ends up taking over the plot and turns what could be a tight action suspenseful climax into a supernatural battle of good vs. evil out of nowhere.


Creviston did such a good job at capturing a psychological thriller that when the book veers towards the supernatural, it becomes jarring.The Caller could have easily remained a normal psychological thriller and have been better for it or the supernatural aspects could have been a part of the story earlier on.

It's almost like Creviston had one idea then halfway through had another idea. So she went with that and combined the two rather than altering the beginning to make the idea flow more naturally.


Even Sydnie's psychic abilities could have remained on a more subtle scale in anticipating danger before it occurs and for her to learn how this criminal was made. But it cheapens all of the character development that the main characters-particularly David and Sydnie- to follow the whole demonic possession angle. Instead of understanding how the characters's choices and upbringing lead them to this behavior, we are told that they have been influenced by angelic and demonic forces and have no real control over the actions. If that was true then what was the point of all of that early character development to turn into a red herring?


Speaking of red herrings, the ending has too many implausible ones at the end. It might be understandable for there to be another stalker going after Sydnie's family, but more than likely they would be a partner or co-hort of David's rather than a separate person with their own agenda. Especially since there were no early signs that this character would do such a thing nor how they were able to come upon the scene at the exact moment when David was also stalking them. At the very least, the two could have worked together combining their plots rather than being separated.



Also, a love triangle begins to develop in the final chapters when one didn't exist beforehand. When this happens, the characters act so bizarrely and uncharacteristically childish that this Reader was tempted to say "Dudes, you're lives are in danger! Get some perspective!"

Then there is the thrown in conclusion meant to tell us in the best horror movie fashion that the fight isn't over.


The Caller has some good things going for it particularly with strong character development between the protagonists and antagonist as a mental chess game between equal opponents. But the flaws make this novel a definite wrong number.