I don’t know about you, but the possibility of a return to my hometown for a reunion with a group of my peers is more than enough context to elicit terror. I don’t need to add any eldritch visions of avenging town founders — or scary, toothy clowns and oversized spiders — to send shivers down my spine.
Yet there must be something primal about that metaphor; every other horror writer trots out the misfit team for just such battles, usually in two parallel time-frames. The kids fall into and then challenge some Evil; the grown-up group re-convenes, re-discovers their bonds, re-assesses who they really are, and re-ups for the Final Showdown.
I am pretty sure Stephen King will get another licensing fee, but a horror fan could do a lot worse than Russell James’ riff on this motif in SACRIFICE.
In 1980, a band of pranksters calling themselves the Dirty Half Dozen find themselves able to see a spectral siren who lures children to their doom. A young girl chases a vision of a boy with a super-cool bubble-blower into traffic; our heroes see a “carrot-nosed,” green-eyed horror with flayed face and a colonial hat, but in the aftermath — trying to catch this culprit — they realize that no one else can see him.
The 1980 time-strand tracks the hardy boys’ investigation, discovering a figure who’s been preying on the children of the towns’ founders for centuries. Thirty years later, the men return to town for a funeral of one of theirs, only to realize that the Woodsman is still at work.
James has a knack for details that flesh out character (one of the teens weas a ratty concert T-shirt with pride, although he never saw the show). And there are a few moments where he shakes off the shackles of convention and evokes something deeply unsettling, as in a dream where a tentacled-bearish creature emerges from a pond, scouring the shore to flay the flock of children playing there.
But he also leans heavily on the shortcuts made possible by genre: the smart-ass banter between the Half Dirty Dozen, the wounded men blah blah redeeming their truer selves blah in the return battle, the somewhat worn-out high jinks of the Woodsman himself — all your favorite menu items from the Big Steve King burger shop.
It is a fast, painless read, which is a sign of both the novel’s pleasures and limitations. —Mike Reynolds
Buy it at Amazon or Samhain Publishing.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Hard as this may be to believe, I enjoyed reading this review.
I appreciate the nice response, and let me tamp down any hint of mean-spiritedness that might seem to poke through in the above review: it ain’t easy to master the Big Steve King menu — it’s hard to serve up a swift, smart entertainment. You do so with deceptive ease. I kvetch a little, but I enjoyed the read. I look forward to catching up with your other work, sir.
Actually Mike, I thought the review was well balanced. You listed what the strengths of the book were, and its weaknesses. I think Mr. James understood that.