Deeper horror

Terrence Rafferty reviews a couple of recent horror novels in the NYT – John Saul’s In the Dark of the Night and Joe Schreiber’s Chasing the Dead . Both, he says, fail to deliver on the hints of deeper horror they toy with:

“These novels are constructed as efficient, relentless terror-generating machines, and as such don’t require (much less encourage) the reader to think about the sources of the florid homicidal rage they put on display. That’s just as well, really. The grievances of narcissistic sociopaths, while impressively comprehensive, get old fast: narcissists are always aggrieved about something.

“By relying on evildoers whose nihilistic anger is almost unrecognizable as an actual human impulse, however, these writers miss a chance to unnerve their readers more profoundly. In the Dark of the Night toys with the provocative notion that the malign spirits of famous old murderers have some sort of mysterious allure for the middle-class, well-brought-up teenage boys who are its main characters. But in the end Saul prefers to transfer the bloodthirsty urges of the dead maniacs to an aging local maniac rather than to any of his young heroes, who snap out of their dark serial-killer enchantment before they’ve done anything that might raise a red flag on their college applications. To call this a failure of the novelist’s nerve would be to understate the case. It’s infuriating to read a horror story that sets up a genuinely disturbing premise and then pulls back from its nastier implications. (We readers can get a little hot under the collar too.)”