Wait Until Twilight by Sang Pak

Title: Wait Until Twilight
Author: Sang Pak
Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Harper Paperbacks (August 4, 2009)
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Review:
Samuel is a teenager who has lost his mother a year back. He lives in a small Georgia town with his father who owns a hardware store. One day he and his friend David decide to film 3 babies that are said to be very odd. Some say they look like the devil. Samuel wants something cool and different for their school project, so on a hot sunny afternoon they head off to the “Underwood”. That’s the place where the triplets live with their mother.

Samuel has a very strong reaction after he sees the babies, to the extent that he pukes. Look at the description:

Their heads are way too big, and their arms and legs are all different lengths. Some long, some just stumps with little fingernails stuck in a semicircle. Even their eyes are different sizes, one larger than the other, and their twisted little noses are hardly there.

The mother is angry and drives them out of the house. After this incident Samuel spends his days as before. But the babies’ faces keep haunting him. They are all he thinks of day and night. Their faces keep on haunting him in his dreams and even when he is awake. He knows he shouldn’t return to the house but he does. The mother of the babies has an older psycho son called Daryl whom Samuel should have probably stayed away from. But as days turn into months he becomes so obsessed by the babies that he keeps going back. He wants to do something to save the babies to find peace within.

Wait Until Twilight is mostly a coming of age story but it’s also a story about overcoming the demons inside you and taking charge. The prose was very simple and hence the book was a quick read. But that was exactly what made the horror and the danger that Samuel was in seem so real. The story grows on you slowly and takes hold of and doesn’t let you go till the very end.

The descriptions of the small town were bang on and I could also feel Samuel’s thoughts, his guilt and his fear seeping through the pages. As the book progressed I grew to really like Samuel and the choices he made. And although I sometimes wanted to tell him that what he was doing was very wrong and dangerous, I also knew that he had to do it.

Conclusion: Wait Until Twilight is a great debut novel and although it’s a YA, it’s one of the books that is without doubt a cross-over.