Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts: A Novel
    Audiobook10 hours

    Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts: A Novel

    Written by Laura Benedict

    Narrated by Emily Durante

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Growing up, Roxanne, Del, and Alice tested the limits of their friendship with cruel, and often dangerous, games-but they always knew they would be bound together forever. Now, Alice's marriage is over, and her husband is having a child with another woman. Roxanne, an artist consumed by her work, is losing touch with her friends-and perhaps with reality. And Del is desperate to be a perfect wife and adoring stepmother, but her friends see that her careful facade is crumbling.

    The instrument of their destruction is a single enigmatic man-Varick. He seems to be a lonely woman's dream come true, but where has he come from? And what does he want?

    As he seduces the women in turn, their lives become unrecognizable to them. Varick's secret lies buried in their shared past. One simple, childish act has brought them, all these years later, to a place where not only their lives but also their souls are at risk. For once upon a time, the three of them agreed to tell a lie-one that ruined the life of a young priest. Defrocked, destitute, and ruined, he hoped with the whole of his shattered heart that he would get revenge. And in that hope he shook hands with the one who promised it. The devil himself. Now they all must live with the consequences.

    Dark and provocative, Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts will keep listeners in its terrifying grip long after the chilling conclusion.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateDec 30, 2008
    ISBN9781423334446
    Unavailable
    Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts: A Novel
    Author

    Laura Benedict

    Laura Benedict is the author of several novels of dark suspense, including Isabella Moon and Devil's Oven. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine as well as numerous anthologies, and she originated and edited the Surreal South short fiction anthology series. She lives with her family in Carbondale, Illinois.

    More audiobooks from Laura Benedict

    Related to Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts

    Related audiobooks

    Suspense For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      On The Shelf

      Jul 23, 2019

      Like A Love Story by Abdi Nazemian is set in 1989 New York City as three diverse teen friends come of age and come to terms with the AIDS crisis. Reza is a closeted Iranian immigrant fearful of having his sexuality discovered by his traditional famil

      2 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Feb 16, 2024

      Books
      4 min read

    • Article

      For March, 3 Romances That Fight For Love

      Mar 19, 2019

      True love finds a way amid food trucks, ice skates and ... knife throwing? In other words, March is just another month in Romancelandia, and we've got three stories of people fighting hard for love.

      2 min read

    • Article

      Her Dark Material

      Feb 7, 2021

      Paradise Beach, Barbados, in the 1980s. The powdery sand is the palest pink, the water is the regulation limpid blue, the coconut palms sway, but behind the tourist postcard lies another world, a mostly black world of poverty, violence and desperatio

      2 min read

    • Article

      5 New Fantasy Novels Invigorate Old Tropes

      May 18, 2023

      Spell books, dragons, mermaids, fairies and a magic circus all take on new life in the pages of these five enchanting tales hitting shelves in May and June.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Fiction

      Jan 20, 2023

      Fiction
      3 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Apr 22, 2022

      Books
      4 min read

    • Article

      Pirates, Ghosts And Gangsters

      Feb 16, 2020

      Pirates, Ghosts And Gangsters
      2 min read

    • Article

      Recent Memory

      Dec 2, 2021

      Recent Memory
      9 min read

    • Article

      Books Of The Month

      Apr 22, 2022

      By Don Winslow This first book in a projected trilogy about warring mobster families is set in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1986. The Italians and the Irish have carved up the city, controlling the trucking industry and the docks. The author makes ov

      2 min read

    • Article

      A Book for the Moment: On Helen Weinzweig’s ‘Basic Black with Pearls’

      Jun 1, 2018

      This post was produced in partnership with Bloom, a literary site that features authors whose first books were published when they were 40 or older. 1. In our current moment, a chorus of “nasty women” has flooded social media with grievances. Unfortu

      5 min read

    Reviews for Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts

    3/5

    13 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      CALLING MR. LONELY HEARTS by Laura Benedict is a supernatural suspense, a genre that I only touch lightly here at Fantasy Debut. Usually, I like heroic tales of high adventure, which this book is decidedly not. But I loved it anyway. I couldn't put it down.


      CALLING is a complex tale about three women, Alice, Roxanne and Del. Alice is the ultimate follower--she would do anything that her hero, Roxanne, says. Roxanne relishes this power, and like all power, it corrupts her. Del is Roxanne's supportive best friend. And Roxanne is the only thing that keeps the three of them together. The story starts when they are thirteen-year-old girls. Roxanne cooks up a ritual--a spell--that will bring them a boyfriend. Del thinks they're just playing. Alice knows they're not.

      Jump ahead about twenty years to a very unpleasant character, a young man named Dillon. Dillon has just had a car accident with a well-dressed man with an unusual name--Verick. It turns out that Dillon's sister is Thad's lover. Who is Thad? Thad is Alice's husband. And Verick has targeted Dillon for a reason. The whole book is like this. All these little connections that don't become obvious until many pages later. It was like trying to trace a spider's web. Not just any spider--a black widow. Which spins a web that looks like nothing more than a tangle of silk.

      And then we have Romero, who turns out to be a former priest. Who turns out to have been a teacher where young Alice, Roxanne and Del went to school. And we have the sin that drew them all together years ago. And another sin that brings them together once again, years later.

      One thing interesting about the horror genre is that it is not afraid to work with Christian elements. This novel has many Christian elements, unapologetically presented. It also has elements of Santeria, which is a blend of Christian saint worship and West African religious traditions. Satan is a character in this novel, and he is absolutely chilling. CALLING is about a deal with the devil--and not the sort of deal you might suspect. And it doesn't have the sort of punishments you might expect. Not all of the sinners die--and not all of the good characters live.

      CALLING is not for the faint of heart. It is not a happy book. I would have preferred that there not be so many deaths at the end, but the author knew when to stop. I expected another death, but he lived. The author may take some heat for underage sex here--underage sex with an adult man--but I think she handled it well. But there is a hero by the end after all-someone I never expected. Bravo for him. It was great.

      This is the sort of novel that I like to read again in order to find answers that eluded me the first time. It's one for the keeper shelf.
    • 3/5
      Roxanne, Del and Alice had been friends since childhood and this friendship carries into adulthood. As children ,their relationship was many times characterized by evil pranks, destructive lies and acts of cruelty. But nothing they did was worse than the lies that lead to the defrocking of a young priest at their school. Though the priest is not at all an innocent bystander, the manner in which the girls destroy him and their reasons for doing so almost makes you sympathize with him. About twenty years later, the girls are now women and still friends. But the same traits that characterized their friendship still remains and seems even more harmful now that they are adults. As a child, Roxanne is mean spirited and uses her intelligence to manipulate and use those around her. As an adult she is pretty much the same, using others and taking things from other just because she can and not even because really wants or needs what she has taken. When they were children, Alice is the "hanger on", constantly trying to make Roxanne happy and do whatever she can to please her. As an adult she still seeks to please Roxanne and she marries a man who obviously does not love her but is looking to cash in on her family's money. Del though the supposed "moral" one of the pair is just as despicable but manages to coat it behind a shell of niceness. What makes her almost worst then the other two is that she has a conscience that speaks to her very loudly but she chooses to ignore it. There was certainly plenty of potential in this book but it never quite lived up to it. The book turned out to be boring in parts, slow in others and sometimes it was actually interesting and a bit of a page turner. When you are reading a book and the one person who you are being forced to root for is a cheating husband who despises his wife but uses her because of her money, then you are reading a really bad book. But all of this would have been a bit easier to take if I felt that the book managed to break new ground. What could have been a excellent Faustian tale becomes a story where you find it hard to really root for or like anyone.
    • 3/5
      In this serviceable horror novel, Benedict alternates between past and present - the misadventures of three young friends and the vengeance that comes back to visit them.After a ritual in the park to summon the perfect lover, Alice alone believes in its success, until the young, handsome Father Romero arrives at their school. Seduced by Roxanne and disgraced, Romero flees the area and the priesthood, bitter at what has happened to him.In the present, all three women meet the mysterious and sinister Varick. As a lover for Alice and Del and a patron of the artist Roxanne, Varick embodies Romero's revenge as he leads them towards destruction.The novel builds slowly and lags in the middle, but the payoff is worth it, if you can make it through. The novel is far too repetitious, as the characters play through minor variations on scene over and over again. (Dillon's repeated disgressions on how much he dislikes Thad are particularly grating, and Benedict has a tendency to describe things using the same adjectives over and over again.)All in all, the novel features an interesting plot with a bad flow. The key scenes are well-written and draw you in, but your interest wanes when you turn the page and are back into the drone of the quotidien. It's worth looking into if you like a more psychological approach to horror, but be prepared to slog through in places.