Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC in return for review.
This book reminds me of Stephen King books from 20 years ago back when Stephen King was the best horror to ever pick up a pen. He is still the greatest ever but hos writing style has changed. Jonathon Mayberry has picked up the torch and I for one am so glad to read this book.
This book had me from the very first page. I really could not put it down.
The backstory on the character named Monk could be a novel all by itself. I wish the author would write a book based on Monk and his abilities!!! I would definitely read it if he did.

This may be the creepiest story I have read in a long time. Jonathan Maberry has created a world of shadows and pain. But he has also created a world of hope. One simple word to drive away the chaos. Just, whatever you do, don't say his name.

Forced to give up her child at the age of sixteen, recovering drug addict Rain now lives a life in the shadows of regret and plagued by nightmares. When she finds herself running extraordinarily late for a job interview, she's discovers she's even later than imagined - Rain has, inexplicably, lost an entire day and has no memory of the twenty-four hours between Thursday and Saturday. Dejected, Rain encounters a mysterious woman on her train ride home who gives her a pair of cracked glasses and then vanishes. When looking through the fractured lens, Rain catches glimpse of people otherwise unseen...including a strange young boy in the company of an even stranger, older man - a man she knows as Doctor Nine, a man who has been haunting her nightmares.

Jonathan Maberry is a hugely prolific author, and one that I wish I could say I've read more of over the years. Although he's perhaps best known for his Joe Ledger series, I've only previously read his zombie stuff, the YA Rot & Ruin series and Dead of Night. I enjoyed those five titles quite a lot, but they did little to prepare me for what to expect here.

Glimpse is a far cry from those zombie thrillers, and Maberry crafts here a complicated, twisty, layered work of horror. I spent a good long while puzzling over how the various pieces and characters fit together while Maberry constructed and slowly built this tapestry of damaged characters and haunting encounters within New York and the strange, ethereal land of The Fire Zone. This is an assuredly more complex story than those earlier, straight-forward zombie pulps. It also has a surprising amount of depth to it, and the amount of information and story within belies the page count. When I say Glimpse feels like a much longer work, I mean this in the best possible sense. This one's a dense little sucker, hefty in its ideas and methodical execution.

Glimpse also feels a heck of a lot like the offspring of Joe Hill's NOS4A2, and I couldn't help but wonder how inspired Maberry was by that earlier work, or if this book would have existed without Hill's influence. There's a lot of commonalities between the two books, circling a number of similar themes and occurrences, and while they share a lot of the same genetic material (a strange villain capable of maneuvering between this world and another by way of a uniquely identifiable classic car, and The Fire Zone is almost a direct inverse of Christmasland), Glimpse stands well enough on its own, and Maberry is certainly comfortable enough in his own authorial skin, for this work to feel similar without being a derivative retread of the other.

At it's core, Maberry is writing about hope and redemption, of fighting for a better life in times of hopelessness. I would have liked to have seen more of the nicely creepy Doctor Nine, but the apocalyptic intonations and mythological folklore baked into the character are absolutely wonderful. Glimpse slowly builds toward a catastrophic, potentially apocalyptic, climax whose scale so terrifyingly casts a huge shadow over the characters that you can't help but feel a foreboding sense of hopelessness. The question then, of course, is how, or even if, Rain and her small support group of recovering addicts, can possibly overcome the all-encompassing terror surrounding them.

It's heady stuff, and Maberry does a remarkable job strumming all the various strings he's pulled together here. Glimpse is loaded with great characters, and I'd be remiss not to mention the tattooed psychic PI, Monk, who deserves a book of his own one day, and some very well depicted moments of fright and terror. All of this is wrapped up in a mind- and time-bending, perfectly executed, package.

[Note: I received an advanced copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley.]

I adored this fantastic mix of fast paced horror, fantasy and thriller set amongst the addicts of New York City. Rain is a recovering drug addict who has been in recovery for a couple of years, however, she has many skeletons in her closet which as the novel progresses play a bigger part in the story. On the way to a job interview a kind old lady lends her her glasses which when she uses sees really weird and trippy stuff, once arriving at the interview she realises she is a day late and somehow has lost 24 hours. Of course her addict friends, who play a big part in the novel think she has been using, far from it! And that's the opening to what was an incredibly well paced fantasy horror novel which has so many great ideas in it it was hard to keep up. The book gets crazier as it goes along, but in the hands of an author as talented and experienced at writing genre fiction as Jonathan Maberry it never misses a beat up until its terrific conclusion. Oh, and I forgot to mention the 'baddie' Dr Nine, is one of the finest I've come across in years. Totally FANTASTIC.

by Jonathan Maberry (Goodreads Author)
U 50x66
Lou Jacobs's review
Dec 14, 2017 · edit

it was amazing

Enter a world where magic is real. And the difficulties of dealing with Guilt and Grief are all pervasive .... This is nothing like the Joe Ledger books .. but rather , a unique, supernatural chiller tour de force. The "Cracked World Society": a group of 4 addicts fight for sobriety. All with memories of loss and pain and failure and descent into addiction. "Rain" (Lorraine) Thomas is are main protagonist and is a "hot mess" She circles the drain of life for seven years with multiple types of addiction ... racked with the guilt of giving away her baby at birth at age sixteen. The father leaves for Iraq, unknowing of the pregnancy and quickly dies in an inferno of flames in a Humvee accident.
Disowned by her family she struggles the last three years to maintain sobriety with the support of her three friends from narcotics anonymous.
She goes to sleep one night in anticipation of a much needed job interview on Friday. However, when she arrives for the interview, she discovers that she has missed it and "lost all of Friday" Her subsequent days spin out of control ... she continues to loose chunks of time .... and begins to confront the supernatural beings of her "dreams" leaking into her conscious life. While embarking on a journey to find answers realizes her friends are experiencing similar dreams and distortions of reality. She is aided by the appearance of "Monk" Addison ... a tough guy investigator .... a psychic bounty hunter who helps her unravel the mysteries and incongruencies
Maberry has weaved a complex, riveting tale that is relentless and probing... with a band of unforgettable characters. As an aside ... I would love to read more about "Monk" Addison.
I would like to thank Netgalley for providing me with an ARC of this tantalizing novel in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you Netgalley for the opportunity to preview Glimpse by Jonathan Mayberry.
Rain is a recovering drug addict living in New York City. She has been clean for a few years, but still fights her demons each day. She doesn't have much going for her except a small apartment, a neighbor "with benefits", and a cat she loves, and a dead boyfriend..
Rain wakes one morning to go on an interview for a job. Her day doesn't start too well - as she waits for her shower water to get hot, she swears someone is in the shower - her cat is hiding under the bed - and she is stricken with fear. No one is there.
As she makes her way to her interview, she meets an old woman who gives Rain a pair of reading glasses. Rain starts to see things; a small boy running. Things start to go out of control for Rain quickly - she gets to her interview and she's a day late. She is missing time and she starts to get really scared.
She is confused and then she meets a strange man who reminds her of her nightmares - is he the monster she created or is he real and is he going to kill her.
Scary and fast paced. Good book.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free digital ARC of this book. This book is true to its title description. The reader won't be disappointed when reading this book.

Rain Thomas, an addict three years clean and sober, she’s struggling to hold on to her sobriety and her sanity, haunted by the ghost of the infant she gave up for adoption and the child’s father, who died in Iraq. To say her hold on sanity is tenuous is putting it mildly. Then she finds a pair of glasses with a crack in the lens. Through the lens she sees things that seem real, yet cannot be. She sees a child being chased by a man she’s only seen in drug induced hallucinations, a child who looks a lot like her dead boyfriend. Rain begins losing time and wonders if she has lost her mind, or if she’s finally seeing the world as it really is. Can she save the boy she believes is her own son, or is she finally losing her battle with insanity? As twisted and surreal a book as I have ever read, Mayberry is relentless with the shocks and twists in this story.