This is an odd little horror novel, well deserving of its most common descriptor: “hallucinatory”. The strange events of one hot summer night on the back roads in western Connecticut unfold in the mind of an unwitting player as he tries to make sense of it all–and there's a lot to make sense of. The mystery revolves around an insane hobo, a damsel in distress, a missing hand, and a body count that continues to rise as the night grows darker. The answers to the holes in all the witnesses's stories and the odd fragments of the narrator's memories that don't always fit together unfold and come together in time and, fortunately, the twist at the end is not what you are led to believe. You do have to accept an exorbitant amount of coincidences, but if you give yourself over to this book, you will feel the sensation of the first moments before you're fully awake, when the events of an unnerving dream seem both impossible and very real.
Joel Townsley Rogers wrote this novel in 1945 amidst a prolific career as both a novelist and a short story author for such publications as Snappy Stories and Detective Fiction Weekly. Red Right Hand is the novel he is most well known for. In fact, most of his other novels are very hard to find.
But what do you think?