(Here's last week's Book Club of the Damned entry, outlining the awfulness of the first half of Travis Thrasher's Christian horror novel Isolation.)

Is the second half of Isolation better than the first?
No.

Is there any redeeming value to the second half of the book?
At least Thrasher admits he's basically ripped off the plot from Stephen King. At one point, the hero, who has already tossed out the previous owner's Playboy collection, ruminates on the horrors that are unfolding:

And that was before—before everything started happening.

Before this house turned into The Amityville Horror, he thought. Or The Shining. All I need to do is get an ax and start wielding it around like Jack Nicholson. The image wasn't amusing.

And then in the acknowledgments, Thrasher steps from behind the curtain:

And finally, a big thanks to an author who has influenced my writing more than any other—Stephen King. During those months of living on top of that mountain and discovering I was a writer, I read a lot of your stories. Thanks for sleepless nights and for helping inspire my love of writing.

What happens to the plot?
Well, the heroes, who were missionaries, start to realize that the house they're staying in is evil:

It was one thing to see Satan's power over a small village in the middle of Papua New Guinea, but this was a hilltop in North Carolina, a state where churches were plentiful and people didn't hesitate to say they believed in God.

And then the wife's brother, Paul, comes to visit. Paul is an unbeliever. So naturally HE TURNS OUT TO BE A SERIAL KILLER. (Remember that Paul and the wife's parents were Satanists who bathed their children in tubsful of blood.) Paul throws the dad off a cliff. He kidnaps the son and tries to get him to renounce God. That doesn't work, and so he kills the boy. Then he becomes a primary narrator, as you can tell from the awful italicized passages that are obviously the voice of madness because it lacks things like punctuation:

That's right if you can't kill them then you burn it you burn this house and the rest and you can burn yourself it doesn't matter it's good to feel something and you can burn it all you can burn all of this to the ground

The tense switches to present tense for a chapter or two, and then back to past tense. I don't think that's supposed to be madness, I think it's just a mistake that never got fixed.

Wow, but the son dies? That's heavy for a Christian horror novel.
Nope. God brings the boy back to life.

Wait, what?
You can tell it's God because he talks in ALL CAPS and tells the boy he has a lot of work to do and a long life to live. He saves the dad from dying when he's tossed off the cliff, too. And that's the biggest problem here: You know that God is going to resolve everything, and so there's no tension at all. The two other people who live in the house die and aren't brought back to life because they're extras, but because our main characters are the main characters, God cares implicitly about them and will come down to Earth to help the father beat his brother-in-law to death with a blunt object. It's almost literally a deus ex machina. It's awful.

So do you recommend this book to anyone?
No. It's awful.

Not even for laughs?
No. It's not funny. It's scary the way things like destroying books for their exotic-ness are celebrated. The way editorial comments like "Pictures of men and women—vile, disgusting pictures posing as art" are thrown about the novel, you realize that the author is exactly the kind of Christian who gives all Christians a bad name.

You're sure it's not funny even a little—
No.

(Sigh.) So what next for Book Club of the Damned?
I've got an idea. A Seattle used bookseller held this book for me simply because it looked so atrocious. I'll probably have it up on Slog by the end of this month.