His book Bad Men, also set in Maine, begins, as a Stephen King book might, with a bad man dreaming in prison of killing a child and of looking on as a six-year-old girl is raped. He has adopted, too, King's portentous, almost biblical tone when describing evil, inverting his sentences like a prophet of doom. 'Here, once, were people,' or, 'Of the men, there was no sign.' He is, too, fond of the one-line paragraph.