The Face of Pain by Tim Waggoner
Critiqued by Anthony Servante
The Summary:
THE DOCTORS SAID IT WAS CANCER,
BUT TRICIA KNEW THE THING INSIDE
HER WAS SOMETHING FAR WORSE
Tricia Everheart is diagnosed with uterine cancer, but despite
her test results, she can’t escape the feeling that she’s not
sick-she’s pregnant. When a mysterious red door appears in
the hospital, she steps through and finds herself trapped in a
nightmarish facility called the Red Tower.
There, a cult of sinister physicians known as the Physickers
worship a foul entity known as the Face of Pain… and they
believe Tricia is its chosen vessel. Her husband, Aaron,
Follows her into the Red Tower, desperate to bring her home.
But the deeper they go, the more they encounter horrors
Beyond comprehension.
Will they escape the Red Tower before the Face of Pain
enters our reality? Or will its birth unravel existence itself?
The Critique:
Horror is a place where you go inside the realm of words. Just ask Tim Waggoner. His place is hued, scented; it has temperature, and it is welcoming. It is also the spectrum of emotion, from fear to fancy, from loathing to love. You know of what I speak: Those dream worlds you visit in sleep, where nightmare and stream of consciousness build walls, towns, and homes, places you are familiar with, places where you've lived many, many times, lived in places with people you've known as long as you can remember, though they are but strangers and and the places unknown locations--except in dream and in well-written horror stories. We get caught up inside the Horror to the point where we forget it's just a book.
When Tricia Everheart realizes she is in the red place, there was no entrance or exit, only existence. She is already there when we, the reader, meet her and first visit the place. And this is our experience, too; we are just there, though you may say that you opened the page and closed the page, still, you are there without pages. That's Tim Waggoner's gift; He creates places that take us there and stay with us, crowding our dream and nightmare space with equal authority, long after we've read the story. But there is something else that accompanies the visit, the knowledge that we, the reader, know that this is not only where "Horror" with a capital h resides; it is also horror itself that we are visiting, not just a story. And it's a joy to get lost there.
Tim Waggoner has a knack for writing such Horror. In The Face of Pain, he has laid out the welcome mat for you to visit a beautifully hellish place. Try not to let it get too deep in your head. Just try.
