Editor & Publisher, has been at for 30 years. In addition to his various management duties, he continues to edit the crime fiction section of the magazine and delights in discovering new hard-boiled writers, particularly those who set their stories in Europe and Asia (where is more than mere window dressing). To get away from books, he attempts to play golf.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
My Kind of Scary
By Bill Ott
Let’s get a couple of things straight: I’m no Dan Kraus. The
really scary stuff in true horror fiction is too much for me. Reading Dan’s
marvelous horror novels, Rotters and Scowler, I’m amazed at his talent but so
creeped out that I have to skip whole chunks of the story. Sorry. Just can’t do
it. When I attended Dan’s reading of Rotters
at a bookstore appropriately called “Buckets of Blood,” I was proud of myself
for remaining upright (unlike one of my colleagues, who was reduced to swaying
back and forth on her haunches—there were no chairs in the room—as Dan
gleefully read about rats scampering about in open graves). It started early
for me. In grade school at Saturday matinees, sitting in the balcony while my
buddies threw popcorn at the creature from the black lagoon, I demurely—and
subtly, so they wouldn’t notice—closed my eyes.
I’m not a complete wimp, however. I can take the kind of
violence, even the occasional bucket of blood, which one encounters in
thrillers and in hard-boiled and noir fiction. Philip Marlowe, after all, never
had to deal with giant rodents. So when I think of my favorite scary books, I
move out of the horror genre altogether. But that’s not to say Chelsea Cain is for
the timid. Cain’s bewitching serial killer, Gretchen (“the Beauty Killer”)
Lowell, with whom Portland, Oregon, cop Archie Sheridan has danced a perverse
pas de deux through five gut-wrenching, incredibly intense novels, simply loves
blood. That’s why she has such a fondness for removing spleens (sans
anesthetic, of course). Archie, naturally, is spleenless at Gretchen’s hand
(she took his spleen, then spared his life), but Archie is only one of several
hapless souls (whose lives were not spared) who have felt the sting of
Gretchen’s scalpel. And she’s not the only psycho in Portland who finds spleen
removal oh-so titillating. In Evil atHeart, the third in the series, a spate of copycats attempts to emulate the
Beauty Killer’s surgical brio (their technique, alas, is sadly lacking). But give
the copycats credit: one of them is equal at least to Gretchen’s flair for
grotesque homicide. Male readers, in particular, don’t want to know by what
body part one undeserving victim was suspended (well, I guess parts would be more anatomically correct).
So I hope I’ve at least partially established my bona fides
here. No, I can’t take chainsaw massacres (or ravenous rodents), but I’m down
with spleen removal, private-part suspension, and a host of other decidedly
unpleasant demises. I heartily recommend Chelsea Cain for anyone, like me, who
can take violence, even grotesque violence, but needs the insulation of a
character-driven, psychologically complex thriller. No, that last sentence is
all wrong. It makes me sound like an NPR type who would never read a crime
novel (“too formulaic”) but laps up Mystery!
on PBS because it’s “literary.” That’s not me, I assure you. What I mean by
“insulation” is that I need a little time to settle my stomach between spleens.
Cain gives me that because, between the gory outbursts, she probes the delicate
psychological underpinnings of her characters as deeply as Gretchen probes our
squishy parts.
Ah, but that annoying Dan Kraus gives the lie to this fancy
theory. His books are every bit as psychologically acute and character driven
as Cain’s, but I’m still way more scared by Scowler
than I am by any of the Cain novels, even Heartsick,
the first in the series, in which poor Archie endures the majority of his
bodily invasions. Why is that? Maybe because Cain is writing a kind of police
procedural, which means she must devote numerous pages to investigatory detail.
With Dan’s books, he’s under no such generic obligation, and you never know
when the rats are coming next. And when they come, oh my God, you just know
that Dan is back there cackling at your terror.
That’s the story. Read Chelsea Cain if you haven’t already;
she’s among my favorite thriller writers. And, if you’re made of sterner stuff
than I am, read Dan Kraus, too, without skipping any pages.
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