CRIMSON is an early novel by horror author and editor Gord Rollo, now available in mass paperback format. As such, it is full of both raw talent and overreaching mishaps in almost equal doses.
Young Johnny Page and his single mom have just moved into the house they inherited in the small Canadian town of Dunnville, Ontario in 1977. Although the new kid in town, Johnny quickly makes friends with three other local boys — David, Tom, and Peter — who know something about the house now occupied by the Page family: Twenty years ago, it was the home of Jacob Harrison, a factory worker who one evening murdered a co-worker and then brutally killed his wife and family as they slept in their beds.
Harrison then hanged himself from the rafters of his son’s bedroom, but his body mysteriously disappeared before the local police could remove it. Since that time, the Dunville citizens, especially the kids, have believed that the property is hunted by the ghost of old man Harrison.
Then, one late afternoon, as the four friends are digging out a clubhouse for their little secret society, they discover an old underground bomb shelter. But soon, their efforts free the tall, disfigured and rotting body of an evil creature that had been dwelling in the well on the Page’s property. The creature (as it comes to be called for the remainder of the novel) is upset for having its rest disturbed and vows to make life horrible for the rest of the four boys’ lives.
And, as it turns out, the creature is a thing of its word. For as the boys grow into adolescents and then into young adults, they are plagued by nightmares of menacing monsters and violent murders of local residents that become true. Eventually, the creature kills off both Peter and Tom, and plants evidence of the murders on David, who ends up serving a death sentence in prison.
But oddly enough, the creature favors Johnny and seems to charm his life with success in school and his professional life in local politics. But the creature, which turns out to be something other than what the boys believed, is still not finished with the lives of the two remaining friends.
Right from the jump, Rollo makes things difficult for himself by choosing the old “Evil Thing Living in the Well” horror motif. But generally, he pulls it off by focusing primarily on his flesh-and-blood characters and secondarily on his monster. Indeed, the moments when Rollo dwells upon the creature, though often filled with some genuine scary moments, are the weakest parts of the novel.
This is especially true when Rollo felt obligated to give his creature a 600-year-old backstory, complete with time served in Hell with Satan himself. These details, as told by the creature to one of the surviving friends, are overly long and stylistically out of sync with the rest of the story. Then, too, almost the entire final quarter of the novel becomes a prison story as David deals with his fellow inmates and attempts an escape before he is to die in the electric chair.
Yet for all its deficiencies, CRIMSON is an earnest effort, free of heavy-duty pretensions, and aiming solely to entertain and occasionally frighten us. And when it does — and it certainly does often enough to justify its purchase price — you get a greater sense of what Rollo can deliver. Several of his subsequent short stories have made good on this promise. So enjoy CRIMSON, but don’t let its drawbacks keep you from seeking out the other works of this talented horror scribe. —Alan Cranis
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• THE JIGSAW MAN by Gord Rollo
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