Solid YA Horror. Weird Whiplash As Book 2 In Series. This book, taken independently, is pretty damn awesome. You’ve got strong 80s vibes, including strong RL Stine type vibes. You’ve got a mall – that quintessential 80s teen experience (says the kid who was never a teen until the mid 90s). You’ve got all kinds of ancient smalltown creepiness and secrets. Seriously, every bit of this is clicking on every level.
You’ve even got monsters that fans of Jeremy Robinson will recognize, as the way Ralph writes his zombies here is very reminiscent of the way Robinson uses at least some types of zombies in his book TORMENT, later retconned to be part of his INFINITE TIMELINE event. Which was nice to see – and possibly shows Ralph to be as … “creative”, let’s go with “creative”… as Robinson. 🙂 One thing Ralph’s version lacks, particularly from Robinson’s original incarnation of TORMENT, is the subtle yet also quite present religious allegory. Ralph’s tale here is instead more straight horror, zero subtext (at least that this reader picked up on).
No, where the whiplash comes in is that the first book in this series was set 40 ish years after this second entry, with the first book being bleeding edge tech and very human horror, whereas this second entry both sends us back in time *and* gives us a far more supernatural style of horror that wasn’t even hinted at in the first book. Read independently, both books are awesome. Read as a “series”… you almost have to envision each book as being the same town in different universes, all experiencing horrors unique to that universe’s version of the town? Which is a bit weird, but can also work well enough. (Indeed, Robinson himself did a horror series that was more akin to Sliders where the entire town slid between universes – he called that series REFUGE, and to date it remains one of his fans’ favorites.)
Still, for what this book itself is, this really was a quite solid YA horror tale that does a phenomenal job of showing its version of this town and its time period quite well indeed.
Very much recommended.
This review of Night Terror by Vincent Ralph was originally written on December 23, 2025.