Two Crappy Horror Novels I Wish I Had Not Read

The aura is the wrong colour!

The Strangers (1984) by Mort Castle: Depressing, nihilistic, pointless, nauseating, and a tad rapey horror novel that ends where it should have begun. Technically, Mort Castle isn't a bad writer. Indeed, just from this brief exposure I'd rate him above beloved horror writers that include Richard Laymon and Douglas Clegg. But this is one of those horror novels that some people might confuse with splatterpunk given the violence. It isn't -- sociologically, it's about as reactionary a thing as one can find in the horror genre. 

Bad things happen because a small percentage of people are Strangers -- bloodthirsty psychopaths who pretend to be normal people as they await The Time of the Strangers. While waiting, they account for pretty much all human atrocity in the world. Luckily, you can spot them by their Auras! Well, not luckily, because no one's going to do much of anything productive in this novel who isn't a Stranger. If you enjoy a pointless catalogue of atrocities and boring characters who are either monsters or victims, this is the novel for you. Not recommended.

Under the Lake (1987) by Stuart Woods: Jesus, what did Stuart Woods have on Stephen King, Pat Conroy, and Andrew Greeley to get the glowing back-cover quotes this novel received? Woods still writes, so far as I can tell, in the thriller genre. That's probably a good idea. Ostensibly a Southern Gothic ghost story, Under the Lake wanders off into ill-advised thriller territory when it should be developing its more gothic elements. Why pay off on atmosphere when you can have a couple of pitched gun battles and an exploding plane? Why indeed. 

There are brief moments of interest here, but the horrific revelation towards the end lands with a dull thud. After all the perfunctory murders, seances, incest, and mopey drunk writers, this is all there is? An unpleasant bit in which a 12-year-old girl is presented as a sexual predator really, really, really doesn't help things. Not at all. Not recommended.

The Rise of the House of Usher

Usher's Passing by Robert R. McCammon (1984): There's more than a whiff of the Southern Gothic about the writing of McCammon (an Alabama native). It doesn't come out in his prose, which has remained sturdy and serviceable throughout his career, but in the plots and characters, which can sometimes jostle with one another in odd, baroque ways. There's about three novels' worth of plot and characters in Usher's Passing. It's about half-a-novel too much, but I was never bored.

After a prologue that establishes Edgar Allan Poe as having based "The Fall of the House of Usher" on a real American family of arms dealers, the novel leaps to the (then) present day of 1984. The patriarch of the Usher family is dying of a peculiar, terrible ailment that only Ushers get. Two of the three heirs are jostling for position, while the third, horror novelist Rix, really just wants to be left alone as he mourns the recent suicide of his wife.

But Rix will come home to Usherland, the Usher family complex that somehow keeps the Ushers unnaturally young-looking so long as they live on its grounds.

Once home, Rix begins to work on a secret history of the Ushers in the hopes that such a book about the immensely secretive clan will jumpstart his faltering writing career. Meanwhile, in the poverty-wracked homes that surround Usherland, a boy searches for his stolen brother. A mythical being called the Pumpkin Man has supposedly been stealing children from the countryside surrounding Usherland for generations. A mythical, giant snake-panther hybrid called Greediguts has been terrorizing the woods for just about as long. A mysterious old man with what appear to be magical powers lives in the ruins of a devastated, forgotten town whose crumbled walls are branded with Hiroshima shadows, at the top of the area's highest hill.

Something lurks inside the original, now-abandoned, gigantic, Winchester-House-like Usher mansion -- abandoned decades ago but still dominating the landscape. Sometimes people who go into the mansion never come out. There are stories of strange earthquakes, comets falling on the mountains, people possessed of magical powers. The fate of the Usher patriarch is always terrible. And the current Usher patriarch is secretively creating a new, devastating weapons system for the U.S. government.

And that's the set-up. Mostly. There are a couple of other subplots that ultimately feed back into the main narrative. McCammon gives us a wealth of creepy historical incident and a number of sharply drawn, sympathetic characters, most prominently Rix and the boy searching for his brother. It all fits together nicely, this story of Gothic horror and nuclear terror and family secrets. Recommended.