This debut novel from John Everson, winner of the 2005 Bram Stoker Award for First Novel, is now available as an attractive mass-market paperback. And that’s fortunate for everyone, as Everson is certainly worthy of greater exposure and a wider readership. COVENANT is, overall, a good and effective horror story. But a some missteps and awkward, unexpected excesses prevent it from being the novel the opening chapters promise it might be.
Newspaper reporter Joe Kieran has moved to the small costal town of Terrel after a successful stint with the Chicago Tribune. But the personal costs of a exposé he investigated and wrote proved too much, so he traded in life in the big city for what he thought would be a more tranquil home and pleasingly dull work at a small-town paper.
Then details of a teen suicide come to Joe’s attention. A local boy, seemingly with everything to live for, threw himself over the rocky cliffs of Terrel’s Peak and into the ocean below. But as disturbing as the death is, the blasé attitude of the local authorities and residents is even more disturbing. As Joe asks around, he discovers that there have been several similar deaths at the Terrel’s Peak cliffs over the years. Looking even deeper, he finds an almost annual pattern to the deaths.
But for the most part, the people of Terrel refuse to talk about the deaths; preferring instead to simply let the dead lie. Soon, Joe feels the renewed tug of a good newspaper article and refuses to leave it alone. Eventually he hears stories, harkening back as far as the town’s founding in the late 1800s, of an evil spirit or demon that dwells within the cliffs and claims a sacrifice each year. Joe dismisses such stories as imaginative nonsense, until he begins to experience the unearthly presence himself.
The opening chapters wonderfully set up an atmosphere of creepy small-town secrets and denials. It hints that there might be some suicide pact the town is embarrassed to admit and covers up with stories of spooks and ghouls. These moments are aided by Everson’s strong characterizations and dialogue, and his descriptions of the costal environment. But sadly, this is immediately dismissed when the demon’s presence is acknowledged. A little more cover-up by the townsfolk might have resulted in a more suspenseful buildup.
But the demon and the promises it made with the town’s residents quickly dominate the story to the very end. And here, roughly from about the middle of the novel, is where things start to slip. For one, it doesn’t help that the evil presence, whose voice is only heard in the minds of its enslaved followers, often talks like a smart-aleck punk. It’s difficult to be afraid of something whose wisecracks are flat and who comes across as an obnoxious boor.
And it also doesn’t help that this particular demon is such a horny little devil. It prefers to initiate the original group of women it possess after having them conduct a lesbian orgy. And it punishes one woman who tries to flee town by subjecting her to brutal sexual subjugation. We can understand why, in one instance near the story’s end, the demon wants to produce a human child, but for the most part, this obsession with sex is unjustified and tends to dampen the rest of the story.
Then there are disappointing instances such as the discovery of the town founder’s journal, which explains how the demon was first summoned and how it came to have its power over the town. It’s essential knowledge, but it happens when Joe and the others are rushing through an underground cavern in a race to prevent more deaths. It could have just as easily — and more effectively — been found earlier in the local library or ruins of an ancient building. But here, it brings an otherwise quickening pace to a dead stop. And, again, the demon insists upon having sex at every opportunity while the others rush to destroy it.
Perhaps these excesses and miscalculations are the result of Everson coming to grips with the demands of the longer form and sustained effects required of a novel. We know from his short story collections that he’s no neophyte. So it’s worth forgiving the deficiencies and hanging in to the novel’s open-ended conclusion. Everson’s next novel, promised for summer 2009 (and sneak-peeked in this edition), is a sequel to COVENANT. Let’s hope it plays up all of his strengths and talents … and if that demon is still out there, that he keeps it zipped for a while. —Alan Cranis
“And then Angelica heard a voice that wasn’t hers coo from inside her. It stole her tongue and lauded the mechanic, begging with a stolen voice, ‘Oh, Herold, I’ve wanted you for SOOO long. Do me from behind. Do me now!’ And as she gagged on that, her hips swivelled and her body bent over, grasping the hood of the truck and mooning the object of her hatred of so many years. Drool was dripping from the corners of her mouth, but the grease monkey didn’t notice.”
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