Disposable Lit Reviews

Leisure Books, 1990
388 pp.
ISBN 0-8439-2904-9
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I’m sure somebody else already had a name for it, but there’s a subgenre of horror fiction that I’ve dubbed “pastoral.” You know the type: a small, isolated town is besieged by unearthly, supernatural forces. During the paperback horror boom of the late ’80’s and early ’90’s, you could swing a dead (or undead) cat without knocking a half-dozen of them off a supermarket shelf, complete with their embossed covers and breathless backcover copy.

Before you condemn the cliche wholesale, though, remember that cliches become cliches because they work, at least before they become overfamiliar. This is more than a variation on the Alien-style “menace in isolation” storyline; when done right, it can paint a portrait of a community in balance, a microcosmic society, encountering something from beyond its bounds and having its harmony upset thereby. This kind of story gets most of its sense of foreboding from the awareness that something alien has invaded the familiar, a powerful theme which you can find anywhere from the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Stephen King’s Storm of the Century.

In Ancients, R. Karl Largent at least tries to keep the scenario from being mere cliche. Unfortunately, in doing so, he manages to bugger up one of the most important parts of the archetype that still works despite all of the paint-by-numbers iterations.

The background is this: Every eleven years, somewhere in northern Canada, there’s been a brutal, unexplained massacre of an isolated community, with dismembered and half-eaten corpses left behind, along with bizarre handprints showing three fingers and two thumbs. The settings have been disparate enough — an Allied supply depot, a Church retreat, a hippy commune — and the reports were officially downplayed enough, that no one noticed a pattern until E.G. Wages, curmudgeonly writer-in-residence at a small New England college, gets a note from one of his old mentor’s graduate students who’s seen the pattern, and wants his help to research it for a book. They see a definite spatial relationship between each of the incidents, and as the eleven-year cycle is coming around, they begin scouring back pages of newspapers covering the region until some bizarre cattle mutilations lead them to the isolate town of Chambers Bay.

And there, really, is the major misstep: Despite having the nominal outlines of a pastoral horror novel, our protagonist and first-person viewpoint character, Wages, is an outsider, and thus discovers the community along with discovering the horror. We aren’t given the baseline desirable normality which makes the abnormal such a jarring and disturbing contrast. Beyond that, the residents of Chambers Bay are introduced to us, not as the cogs of the community with a natural order to them, but as witnesses, victims, and fellow combatants of the ooky-spookies to be encountered.

If this were the only flaw, then it wouldn’t necessarily be a flaw; it could simply be a tale told differently. But unfortunately, the tale gets unwieldy in so many other ways that there’s no single thing “done right” that everything else can hang on.

In addition to a cast of characters introduced largely without their community context (and in numbers that make it hard to keep interchangeable townsfolk straight), we get a horror which is pretty lumpy in itself. Stephen King made a point that far too many later horror writers missed: The boogeyman doesn’t need to be novel, complex, or flashily colorful. It simply needs to be powerful and scary. But instead of just being a scary novel, Ancients also tries to be a mystery of sorts, as the complicated backstory and nature of the menace is uncovered and pieced together. I’ve got nothing against mysteries, naturally, but the cerebral exercise of trying to figure out what’s going on distracts from the more visceral impact of being all too aware of what’s going on.

And that would be if the final, revealed source of the horror didn’t turn out to be kind of silly anyway. We’ve got too many arbitrary details: the precise eleven-year cycle, the two-thumbed hands of the creatures that turn out to be behind it, the counterintuitive theology of a body of cultists who pursue a faith with no visible reward or appeal for the believer. It all becomes a mishmash, and the only way to disguise it is to read it fast enough that the pace keeps you from dwelling too long on what you’ve already read.

Which is a shame, really, as Largent’s prose style is snappy and engaging, if sometimes a little unwilling to trust the reader to understand things without having them spelled out. It’s not a story poorly told so much as a poor story, no matter who’s telling.

From what I can tell, after a few horror novels, Largent has now switched to suspense and espionage. That may be a better venue for his penchant for convoluted backstories and plot mechanics.

Nathan Shumate