Kathy Ryan’s work as an occult investigator often leads her to the outskirts of society, law, and even reality… strange, alien flora but seemingly no sentient beings…just a huge, abandoned city that a team of scientists is sent to explore.
Then the scientists disappear. Kathy Ryan is hired to make her first foray into an alternate dimension in order to locate the team, bring them back, and close the gate for good. Instead, she discovers that this supposedly dead city may be nothing of the kind. Her rescue mission has become a terrifying race to prevent the potential destruction of the boundary between two worlds—before mayhem reigns over both…
Praise for the novels of Mary SanGiovanni
“SanGiovanni evokes a Lovecraftian sensibility in this action-filled story. . . . Scary, suspenseful, smart, and gory, the novel is also beautifully set and described.”
—Library Journal on Savage Woods
“A feast of both visceral and existential horror.”
—F. Paul Wilson on Thrall
“Filled to the brim with mounting terror.”
—Gary A. Braunbeck on The Hollower
“A fast-building, high-tension ride.”
—James A. Moore on The Hollower
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BEYONE THE GATE (A Kathy Ryan novel), is the fourth I’ve read featuring the paranormal specialist, written by author Mary SanGiovanni. While each story is complete on its own and can be read independently of the others, there is a slight build up of personal information that I enjoyed discovering by reading them in order.
The character of Kathy Ryan is complex and mysterious. Little is known outside of the fact that she specializes in occult cult-like activity, that engages in attempts to open “gateways” to other dimensions. Kathy’s job is to keep them closed.
“. . . Kathy Ryan had to sew up a gaping hold into another dimension . . . ”
We begin in the town of Haversham, with police talking to people from the enigmatic Paragon Corporation about a most disturbing and inexplicable . . . disappearance.
“. . . When you’ve been patrolling Haversham as long as Lefine and I have, you hear it all: Psychotic creatures parading around as nurses over at the hospital, doorways to Hell in the woods, UFO’s, cryptids, even giants . . . ”
When Kathy gets the call to go down and help, information isn’t rapidly forthcoming. The fact that she was “known” and called to begin with, tells Kathy all she needs to know.
She’s there to clean up someone’s mess.
“. . . The world is strange–stranger than people think. I just do my part to keep it together and sane.”
Aside from Kathy, I honestly wasn’t very invested in many of the other characters. This could be partly because I love the recurring character, or simply because the others were all second-stage to the expert in this novel.
“. . . We found hell, a quiet kind of hell, and that’s the worst kind . . . ”
The beginning started out strong, but about a third of the way in, I began to get a little bogged down with a large amount of speculation on what Paragon discovered. Since this was all “new” territory, much of it just didn’t stick with me, or flat-out confused me.
“. . . human beings make terrible witnesses, because they see what they want to, or worse, what they really don’t want to . . . ”
Overall, while I still love the concept of Kathy Ryan and her occult knowledge, this particular book just felt like it went too far into territory that was overwhelming in terms of names/locations towards the end.
I did enjoy the general idea, and a lot in the beginning of the book. My main issue was that too much “unfamiliar” knowledge was being thrown around, with little chance of really understanding it before even more new concepts were introduced.
“. . . Didn’t gates work both ways? . . . ”
Still, it was worth it for reading more about Kathy Ryan, herself.
Kathy Ryan returns for her fourth outing if you count 2016’s Chills, and I most certainly do, because that’s where we first meet her! But, hey, what do I know…
Beyond the Gate sees Ryan hired on as a consultant for Paragon, a high-tech scientific research group with ties to the military weapons complex. Paragon has just opened a rift between dimensions and most of their teams of explorers have gone missing. A few, though, have come back and despite Paragon’s assurances to the contrary, they seem to have brought something back with them. In their dying days, the survivors recount seeing faces in their furniture and voices urging them to do terrible things… While Paragon tries to cover up these anomalies, Ryan and small team are enlisted to pass through the gate and into another world in a last-ditch attempt to save the missing scientists.
When it comes to crafting cosmic horror, Mary SanGiovanni is a top-notch writer and Kathy Ryan quickly became one of my favorite heroines when she was introduced a few years back. In Beyond the Gate, SanGiovanni gets right into the nitty gritty straight off the bat, introducing us to the horrors that are in store for us via a police officer’s debriefing. Officer Carl Hornsby was one of the first on scene to witness the death of Dr. Van Houten, a Paragon researcher afflicted with a mysterious disease. Between this interview, a brief exchange of corporate e-mails, and the diary of Claire Banks, we’re given plenty of insight on the world and its strangeness, which SanGiovanni exploits to the hilt later in the narrative to great effect.
The world of Heyschia, and its enormous abandoned city, oozes creepy dread. The world is also situated in a different dimension than what we pesky humans can comprehend, and SanGiovanni has fun playing with the shifting perspectives of objects and locations, with the city seemingly rearranging itself at random. The constantly changing terrain wreaks havoc with the explorers minds, including Ryan’s, coupling with the strange voices they begin hearing, conjuring thoughts of violence. As for the city itself, it’s buildings are all much, much larger than the human explorers, indicating that the world was once populated by massive alien life. Of course, just because the city is abandoned, we learn pretty early on that doesn’t mean the world itself is devoid of life…or at least Heyschia’s version of life…
Where SanGiovanni’s scary creativity really shines, though, is in her descriptions of some pretty awful stuff. I dug the way Heyschia’s alien disease affected its victims, and the author crafts some nicely disturbing imagery there. Very cool, too, was the use paredolia, a psychological phenomena that causes people to ascribe human characteristics to inanimate objects, like seeing faces in the patterns of a sofa or the grain of a wooden door. Here, it’s a great way of transforming everyday objects into something far more sinister and haunted. Where her imagination really kicks into overdrive, though, is in the book’s climax where we get some really nifty, nightmarish descriptions of Heyschia’s inhabitants. It’s supremely cool stuff!
If you’re read the prior Kathy Ryan books, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what to expect here, although SanGiovanni does up the ante nicely by taking the action in some new, unearthly realms. However, it’s also a pretty accessible entry point for new readers. All the necessary information on Ryan is provided here, and references to her past cases are kept to a minimum. SanGiovanni has constructed this series so that each book stands alone well enough, but certain on-going concerns connect better when you’re familiar with those ancillary characters in Ryan’s life, even if they’re only briefly mentioned in passing.
Beyond the Gate is another solid entry on the on-going Kathy Ryan series, and just as I did when I finished the prior installments, I find myself already growing impatient for the next book.