Night Fall by Nelson DeMille. Warner Books, 2004. $26.95 — 496 pp.

The Home by Scott Nicholson. Pinnacle Books, 2005. $6.99 — 349 pp.

Summer is the time for the fat book that reads quickly, a scuffed, suntan oil absorbing behemoth of a book that can endure hot beaches or dew-drenched mountain meadows with equal equanimity, a book with a plot that keeps you turning the pages, one you can put aside for a walk along the sand or a hike up to the top of the knob above the meadow.

Nelson DeMille’s Night Fall perfectly fits this description. In Night Fall, as in so many of DeMille’s other novels, the author takes a real event and then examines it through the prism of fiction. Here, the event is the mysterious airplane explosion of TWA flight 800 on July 17, 1996, just off the coast of Long Island. Despite government reassurances that mechanical failure caused TWA Flight 800 to blow apart, many people, including eyewitnesses to the crash, believe that the aircraft was shot from the skies with a missile.

Enter DeMille’s fictional characters: John Corey, a contract agent with the Federal Anti-Terrorist Task Force, and his wife, Kate Mayfield, an attorney and FBI agent. Mayfield, who worked the case of TWA 800 and who has never believed the official explanations for the crash, convinces her husband to reopen the case. She has heard that two people who had videotaped themselves engaging in sex on the beach that evening had caught the crash on film. As Corey searches for the missing videotape, his path blocked by angry government men and women from several federal agencies, we learn the intricacies of this case along with him — the doubts cast by many of the eyewitnesses, the “facts” that simply don’t fit the event, the sad possibility that our government once again lied to us. Incidentally, those who keep up with such things will be aware that several people have raised the possibility that the airliner was accidentally shot down by our own Navy, which was on maneuvers in the area. DeMille convincingly lays this possible scenario to rest when he explains the impossibility of imposing such a silence on so large a complement of sailors.

Nearly all of DeMille’s books have made the best-seller lists, and Night Fall is no exception. Like the other books, Night Fall offers its readers interesting characters, plenty of action, and a plot that mirrors real life.

If you’re more inclined to the weird and the supernatural than to suspense, this summer is a good time to give Scott Nicholson’s books a try. Nicholson, who lives and works in Western North Carolina, is becoming well known in the book trade and among readers for what he calls his “Appalachian Gothic Thrillers.”

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Nicholson’s latest book is The Home, the story of a boy named Freeman Mills who is sent to Wendover, a home for troubled adolescents. Freeman, who can sometimes read the thoughts of other people as a result of experimentation done by his father, soon discovers that similar experiments are being conducted at the center and that this is the reason for his own presence at Wendover. Soon we discover that the research done by Dr. Kracowski is also calling forth something completely unexpected not only from the children, but from the very walls and stagnant air of this former psychiatric ward.

Nicholson has a strong talent for writing Gothic novels. He paints with a broad brush and is unafraid to go for big emotions and grand descriptions. His prose has the drive and descriptive density of a younger Stephen King. Here, for example, is his sketch of the house:

The home was set a hundred yards from the fence, two-story wings set off from a three-story main entrance. The building looked like some giant bird, grounded by its own mass, its bones broken. The windows had little awnings over them, giving the appearance of brooding eyes. Even with the stone façade, the building bore that institutional look, as if it were always dark on the inside and independent thoughts would be locked in the broom closet for punishment.

The Home will leave some readers unsatisfied. Like King, Nicholson tends to go overboard in terms of emotional descriptions, so that all his characters, adults and children, seem to possess a middle-school mentality. Some of these characters, moreover, are cartoonish in their predictability. Francis Bondurant, for example, who helps administer Wendover, knows that “Freeman Mills needed to get right with God, needed to mend his sinning ways, needed to let Jesus in to cure that troubled heart.” Bondurant, in short, is that stock character of American fiction of these last eighty years—the Christian fanatic set to convert you or kill you. Surely with all the weird and wacky running around these mountains, we can devise more original villains than this dead horse.

But these are quibbles, applicable to most novels of this genre. If you like Gothic novels and you want one close to home, you probably can’t do better than reading The Home.

(Jeff Minick lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)