Several months ago I received an e-mail from a group that I’m a part of saying that an author had been researching people whom were of the same interest as those of us in this group, and that he was offering free copies of the book to people interested in reviewing it. I signed up for the site, sent in my request, and not long after the book arrived in the mail! So here is my promised review of T.L. Hines’ “The Unseen.”

First let me start off by saying that, while I read the flap of the book that said that this was a “Noir Bizarre” book, it never really hit me what that meant until about halfway, if not more, through the book. I had no idea what the book is about, the description on the back is rather vague, and I’m thankful for that, because it makes it so much more exciting when the back of the book doesn’t give away half of the plot! When I first received the book I started reading it immediately and I knew it was going to be good. The book pulled me right in, and kept me in it’s clutches!

The Unseen follows the story of Lucas, a young man whose life as a loner gets more and more complicated with each person he meets, through a strange encounter with an Urban Explorer and the group he’s tied to, The Creep Club. Lucas is an Urban Explorer, he’s in the walls, he’s in the ceiling, he’s all around us, silently watching, silently connecting. You have nothing to fear though, he does it just for him, just because of the curiosity in him that he calls Dark Vibrations. He has his own strict code of ethics, he would never sneak into someone’s home, but offices were okay. As the story progresses his ethics are tested to every extent, his Dark Vibrations sparked in ways he’d never imagined.

After having a chance encounter with Donovan, a Creep Club member, and an Urban Explorer whom unknowingly invaded Lucas’ home in the steam tunnels under a university, Lucas is invited to attend one of the club’s meetings where he discovers that the Creep Club is a group of Urban Explorers that sneak into people’s homes, and set up cameras, watching them, recording them. They call this art… They edit the videos, and show them to the rest of the club durring meetings. But not everything is as it appears, the Creep Club turns out to be more than just a group of Peeping Toms. Lucas and the club doesn’t see eye to eye and he isn’t welcomed into the group as hoped, but as he leaves the club he’s approached by a man who claims to work for the government, and he wants Lucas to infiltrate the club and help to take it down. As the story unfolds things become stranger and stranger and Lucas is faced with many tough choices that puts his and others’ lives in danger.

The story begins at a moderate pace but quickly picks up and grabs hold of you, I started off reading a chapter a night for the first half, and then I lost control, reading the second half in one weekend. At first I didn’t like the dabble of Noir Bizarre in the story, I felt like it was intruding in the story, it truly plays such a small part that the story seems like it could do without it, but the last quarter of the book kicks up the bizarre level, brings it all together and wraps up with an amazing ending.