The Paintings by Gerald S. Passmore: Book Review of a Pennsylvania Thriller About Fifteen Years of Silence

Quick verdict: The Paintings by Gerald S. Passmore is a dark, profane, very human psychological thriller about a group of old friends who survived a violent night in the Allegheny National Forest and have kept quiet about it for fifteen years. It’s strongest when it sits with those people and what the silence has done to them. Read it if you like thrillers where the characters matter as much as the killer. This review is spoiler-free.

What Is The Paintings About?

Pete Barber hasn’t slept properly in fifteen years. Every night he dreams of the same forest, the same fire and the faces of his friends, and the worst version always ends the same way: his wife Mary, an accomplished painter, turns her easel around and shows him a painting of his own death. He has never told her about the dreams.

Now the old group is getting ready for its fifteenth-anniversary weekend at the cabin they share deep in the forest outside Kane, Pennsylvania. Mary has been working on a secret project for months, painting at night and sleeping through the day, and she won’t let Pete see it. Jason Somers, a federal forest ranger and the friend who stayed closest to the cabin, has just met the township’s new police sergeant, a quiet city transfer who asks a lot of questions about an unsolved multiple murder in the forest. And somebody out there knows exactly what happened that night.

That’s the setup. Passmore lets the rest come out slowly, through flashbacks, through what the friends say to each other at the cabin, and through Mary’s paintings themselves.

What Works in The Paintings

The dreams are part of the plot, not decoration

The novel opens with a long, strange Prologue of Pete’s dreams: a stolen 1975 Ford LTD tearing through his high school hallway, a gas station stacked with guitar amps, a field you won’t forget in a hurry. It’s funny and grotesque in turns, the way real dreams are. Then the images start coming back in the waking story, and you realize Passmore has been planting details from the first page.

An ensemble of ordinary adults

This isn’t a book about detectives. Pete runs mechanical systems for a living and plays blues on a 1957 Stratocaster. Ted is an EPA geologist who carries a rock hammer and a 10x loupe. Sherri, his wife, is a paralegal whose panic attacks can stop an elevator between floors. Harlan tells terrible jokes. Each of them has become, as the Amazon description puts it, “the versions of themselves that survival required.” Jason’s chapters are especially good. He couldn’t move during the attack, and he has spent fifteen years building his body into something that will never fail his friends again.

The unveiling scene

When Mary finally uncovers her canvases at the cabin, one for each friend, each framed in hand-chosen wood, the book slows right down. It’s the emotional center of the novel, and it does what the title promises. One character puts it simply: hearing the story told him what happened, and the paintings showed him what it looked like to be there.

A real sense of place

Passmore knows Northwestern Pennsylvania. Kane’s Main Street, the bars on Route 6, the gray “Bradford Black Cloud” that rolls in off the Great Lakes, the oil pump jacks “nodding rhythmically like tired old men” across the forest. The setting feels lived in, not looked up. (We wrote a separate guide to the real places in The Paintings if you want to see them.)

Humor in the dark

For a book this grim, it’s often very funny. The friends rib each other the way only people who’ve known each other since grade school can, and Chief Warren McCord, a hard-drinking country music fan who hates Jason’s heavy metal, nearly steals every scene he’s in.

What Might Not Suit Every Reader

• Strong language and drug use. The characters swear constantly and smoke a lot of weed. It fits who they are, but it’s on almost every page.
• Graphic violence. The attack fifteen years ago is described in detail, and a later captivity sequence is hard to read.
• A big cast. There are ten or so main characters, and two of them are named Sherri and Sherry (Ted’s wife and Pete and Mary’s teenage daughter). Our book club guide has a character list if you want one handy.
• The genre label. Amazon shelves it under ghost thrillers and ghost mysteries. The haunting here is mostly psychological. If you want a literal haunted cabin, this isn’t that book. If you want people haunted by what they did, it is.

The Revised Edition

Gerald S. Passmore first released The Paintings in 2014. The 2026 revised edition was edited and published with Writers of the West, and in the acknowledgements Passmore credits a critique from a reader named Andy H. as the push behind the revision. If you read the original, this is a reworked version, not just a new cover.

Who Should Read The Paintings?

• Readers of Dennis Lehane and Peter Straub who like old friendships under pressure
• Anyone who grew up in, or has visited, the Allegheny National Forest and the towns around it
• Book clubs that want a thriller with enough to argue about afterward
• Readers who enjoy dream sequences and stories told partly through art

Looking for more like it? See our list of thrillers about old friends with a dark secret.

Final Thoughts

The Paintings is about what happens to people who never got to talk about the worst night of their lives. The killer is real and the threat is real, but the question that drives the book is whether these friends can finally say out loud what they’ve been carrying, and what it will cost them when they do.

The Paintings: Book Details

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Lisa Eldridge

Lisa’s the history buff who turns pages into portals to the past. She’ll transport you through time with her historical fiction recommendations and insightful reviews.