Using Halloween in New York City as the setting for his psychological thriller The Animal Hour feels cheap the prefab craziness circumvents the task of evoking real fear. Andrew Klavan (Don't Say a Word) does scrape the veneer of Ominous Atmosphere from that urban carnival, tracing the slowly converging paths of a disoriented young woman who has lost her identity and a boozy poet implicated in a West Village decapitation. But as an internal mirror to the city's madness, the pair's italicized mental noodlings prove less suspenseful than just plain insipid. C


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