Books: The Season of Passage By Christopher Pike (1992)

 

"The year is 2004 and, detente in place, the U.S. has sent a manned mission to Mars to find out what happened to and perhaps rescue the Russian cosmonauts who landed there two years earlier and have not been heard from since. Lauren Wagner, chief medical officer on the U.S. unit Nova, suspects alien infection killed the crew of the Lenin and worries that the same may happen to those on her ship. Little does she know that they face a fate far worse: there are vampires on Mars!"

Veteran YA horror author Pike released this more science fiction than horror tale in 1992 (though set in 2004). As a long time book seller for various retail outlets, I was more than aware of his prolific output. Much like R.L. Stine and his spooky books for kids, Pike seemed to be the next step for those kids who outgrew the Goosebump stories. The Season of Passage is defiantly bent towards adult, though, and it starts out as fairly compelling. But eventually, at well over 400 pages in paperback, it becomes bogged down in campiness and bad 50’s B-movies cliches Joel and the ‘bots would make fun of on MST3K.

I can now see why I never read his books, even though this one came highly recommended. He’s like the James Patterson of young adult books, with a cringe-like prose and with a grasp of science that is laughable a best. Any reader of The Expanse series who loved the more realistic science presented in that series will really have to suspend their beliefs here, as Pike throws what knowledge of space he knew back in the early 1990s right out the window.

To justify the pages, I guess, there is subplot concerning Lauren's earthbound sister and a story she is writing -which appears to be a telepathically received fable about how Mars became a wasteland of ghouls (the book goes out its way to give some credence to why Mars lost its atmosphere). But even that part, more interesting than the rest, cannot save this very silly book

Books: The House Next Door By Anne Rivers Siddons (1978)

“Thirty-something Colquitt and Walter Kennedy live in a charming, peaceful suburb of the newly bustling Atlanta. Life is made up of enjoyable work, long, lazy weekends, and the company of good neighbors. Then, to their shock, construction starts on the vacant lot next door, a wooded hillside they'd believed would always remain undeveloped. Soon, though, they come to realize that more is wrong than their diminished privacy. Surely the house can't be "haunted," yet something about it seems to destroy the goodness of every person who comes to live in it, until the entire heart of this friendly neighborhood threatens to be torn apart.”

Author Anne River Siddons was mostly known for her novels set in the South, being closer to Pat Conroy in tone, than what she was really remembered for, the sometimes complicated world of Chick Books. The House Next Door was her second book and an hundred and eighty degree from her debut (and despite the success of this book, never tried her hand a Gothic horror again). But the book, despite the fact that Stephen King once called it the “Finest horror novels of the 20th Century", and provides a lengthy review of the novel his non-fiction Danse Macabre book, can go either way when it comes to what is exactly happening here. In other words, it’s left up to reader to guess if all the things that occur in the book, in that house, are supernatural or just a case study on our flawed lives.

Yes, the improbably named Colquitt and her husband Walter begin to believe otherwise, but by then I was rushing through the book to get it done. It’s atmospheric in the beginning and the prose is well written, and those who were born and bred in the upper echelon of Southern life, will appreciate it never making fun of the ridiculousness of it all. And since it was published in 1978, the book contains bits of casual racism, homophobia, and deaths of a few pets.

It’s certainly a different kind of haunted house story, but it won’t be for everyone.

Books: Thinner By Richard Bachman (1984)

“Billy Halleck, good husband, loving father, lives in Connecticut and practices law in New York City. He is both beneficiary and victim of the American Good Life: he has an expensive home, a nice family, and a rewarding job…but he is also fifty pounds overweight, and, as his doctor keeps reminding him, he is thirty-six years old-edging into heart attack country. Then Billy Halleck sideswipes an old Gypsy woman as she is crossing the street in their quiet little southern Connecticut town of Fairview, and everything in his pleasant, upwardly mobile life changes. He is exonerated in the local court by a friendly judge and sheriff…but a blacker, far worse judgment has been passed on him, nevertheless. Billy Halleck begins losing weight. He is pleased at first, then worried, and finally terrified. He can't stop it. He eats and eats but the weight flies off.”

After four books Stephen King had written under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman between 1977 and 1982 (none of which I’ve yet read, but am working on changing that), this 1984 novel was the one that outed him (but it wasn’t him who did it, it was, of all people, a bookseller at a B. Dalton’s). As the story goes, “the general view among publishers was that an author was limited to one book per year, since publishing more would be unacceptable to the public. King therefore wanted to write under another name in order to increase his publication without over-saturating the market for the King ‘brand’. He convinced his publisher, Signet Books, to print these novels under a pen name. King has stated using the Bachman name was a purposeful “attempt to make sense out of his career and try to answer the question of whether his success was due to talent or luck. He says he deliberately released the Bachman novels with as little marketing presence as possible and did his best to ‘load the dice against’ Bachman.” King concluded he never found the answer to that particular question, whether it was talent or luck that made him successful.

“King dedicated Bachman's early books—Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981), and The Running Man (1982)—to people close to him. The link between King and his shadow writer was exposed in early 1985 after Stephen P. Brown, a bookstore clerk in Washington, D.C., noted similarities between the writing styles of King and Bachman. Brown was an avid King fan who had also read all of Bachman's books. After reading an advance reading copy of Thinner, which came to his store a few months before its publication, he was "eighty percent convinced" that Bachman was King; he noted that their style was only differentiated by the downbeat endings of Bachman's books, which runs counter to King's general philosophy of ending his books in an uplifting manner (with Pet Sematary and Cujo being exceptions). Brown located publisher's records at the Library of Congress which included a document naming King as the author of one of Bachman's novels. Brown wrote to King's publishers with a copy of the documents he had uncovered, and asked them what to do. Two weeks later, King telephoned Brown personally and suggested he write an article about how he discovered the truth, allowing himself to be interviewed. At the time of the announcement in 1985, King was working on Misery, which he had planned to release as a Bachman book.”  

For the book itself, I can see why Brown felt this book was written by King. There are a lot similar styles to writing, including a few catch phrases King has used for decades. As an example, released just before King’s epic novel IT, there is a line about and evil clown with a balloon. Then there is part where Billy and his Dr. Houston are talking about his weight loss, and Houston says, “You were starting to sound a little like a Stephen King novel for a while there.” And then Billy adds, while talking about two other people who’ve been cursed, “..it starts to sound a little like a Stephen King again, wouldn’t you say?”

Over all, the book does feel padded –I was struck how much of this could’ve been a novella instead of 300+ page novel. It’s pretty creepy, though, and it does make you think about all the mistakes we make in life, including the price you have to pay (“It's a cash and carry world. Sometimes you pay a little. Mostly it's a lot. Sometimes, it's everything you have,” as Mike Anderson would discover in the 1999 King written TV movie Storm of the Century). There is some gore, some decent suspense, so it does have the King stamp on it; and it’s  fun.

Books: The White Devil By Justin Evans (2012)

"Andrew Taylor, a 17-year-old American expelled from a Connecticut prep school for heroin use, gets into Harrow thanks to his father's generous gift to the school, one of whose more illustrious alumni is Lord Byron. In a cemetery on nearby Harrow-on-the-Hill, Andrew is horrified to witness the murder of a fellow student and resident of the Lot, a dilapidated dormitory reputed to be haunted, at the hands of a pale skeletal figure in an old-fashioned frock coat. Soon plagued by nightmares, Andrew learns that someone resembling this gaunt figure appeared in a performance of John Webster's Jacobean tragedy, The White Devil, at Harrow in 1803. Meanwhile, cast in the role of Lord Byron in a play written by drunken and bitter housemaster Piers Fawkes, Andrew finds himself adopting Byron's exotic lifestyle amid a love affair, a TB epidemic, and other various bizarre elements." 

The White Devil, the second novel by Justin Evans, is a wonderfully weird and disturbing Gothic thriller that often reminded me of late 1960s or early 1970’s British film. Although set in present day, a lot of the book feels old and from another age. Perhaps the premise, using Lord Byron, the legendary English poet who was the leading figure of the Romantic movement, helped age the tale, but the Harrows School, with its traditional dress code and it’s particular ways of describing the students, also gave an air of oldness to the story. Then the clichéd dreary, often damp weather added to the mood immensely,

Evans clearly did some great research here, which probably makes the whole book interesting because it is partially based on historical facts. And our two male leads are flawed, but often given opportunity to grow beyond their pasts. I often thought they were in love with each other, even though there was an age difference, but more so, because they never realized it (especially Piers Fawkes, who is arrogant and unflinching in his rule breaking, but clearly hiding something more than just that, using booze and cigarettes as a shield). It’s this unpredictability between the characters that kept me reading, if only because I wanted to see what they did –Evan’s never telegraphs anything.

I loved Evan’s debut novel, 2007’s A Good and Happy Child and The White Devil offers more thrills and gothic atmosphere for anyone who needs something to read on a cold, dreary Saturday afternoon (preferably in October).

On a side note, I can find no more books written by this author since the 2012 release of The White Devil. It also turns out that “Justin Evans” is a pretty common name, so even Googling him did not help. I’m curious what happened to him.