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Summary
Summary
David Binder is a young, successful writer living in Chicago and suffering from writer's block. He stares at the blank page, and the blank page stares back--until inspiration strikes in the form of a ghost story that captivated him as a child.
With his pregnant wife and young daughter in tow, he sets out to explore the myth of Virginia Beale, Faery Queen of the Haunted Dell. But as his investigation takes him deeper and deeper into the legacy of blood and violence that casts its shadow over the old Beale farm, Binder finds himself obsessed with a force that's as wicked as it is seductive.
A stirring literary rendition of Tennessee's famed Curse of the Bell Witch, Little Sister Death skillfully toes the line between Southern Gothic and horror, and further cements William Gay's legacy as not only one of the South's finest writers, but among the best that American literature has to offer.
Author Notes
William Gay was born in Hohenwald, Tennessee on October 27, 1941. After graduating from high school, he joined the United States Navy and served during the Vietnam War. Before becoming a writer at the age of 57, he worked as a carpenter, drywall-hanger and house painter. His first short story, I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, was published in the Georgia Review literary journal in 1998. In 2009, it was adapted into a film entitled That Evening Sun starring Hal Holbrook. His first novel, The Long Home, was published in 1999 and won the James A. Michener Memorial Prize. His other works include Twilight, The Lost Country, and Provinces of Night, which was also adapted into a film, entitled Bloodworth starring Val Kilmer and Kris Kristofferson in 2010. He died of a heart attack on February 23, 2012 at the age of 70.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This horror story from the Southern gothic author Gay (Twilight), who died in 2012, takes the popular Bell Witch ghost tale as its direct inspiration. David Binder, a budding author in his early 30s, resides in Chicago with his wife, Corrie, where he works his day job at an aircraft parts plant. He breaks through when his debut novel is published in 1980 to much critical acclaim but only tepid commercial sales. After his follow-up novel gets rejected, Binder's literary agent advises him to write a horror novel, which is the current hot-selling genre. He decides to base his third novel on the Bell Witch legend and relocates his family, including his young daughter, Stephanie, to Beale Station, in his native state of Tennessee, to conduct book research. The Binders live in the old homestead, "a ruined backwoods mansion," where the Bell Witch ghost incidents occurred in the early 19th century. Gay inventively gives his version of the bizarre, often creepy back story about the legend. Though Gay's story feels a bit thin in spots, his signature muscular prose, authentic dialogue, and vivid setting combine to make this posthumous novel a worthwhile read. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Eric Brown on Adam Nevill's Lost Girl; Ann Leckie's Ancillary Mercy; Dave Hutchinson's Europe at Midnight; David Barnett's Gideon Smith and the Mask of the Ripper; William Gay's Little Sister Death Adam Nevill excels at making nightmares real. His previous novels have been out-and-out horror, stories of hauntings and occult phenomena peopled by fully realised, three-dimensional characters. Lost Girl (Pan, [pound]7.99) explores new territory and combines two hellish scenarios: the effects of climate change on society, and every parent's nightmare of having their child abducted. The year is 2053 and the world's population is suffering the onslaught of global warming: drought and famine push millions towards Europe; nations teeter on the edge of nuclear conflict; and Britain is rapidly failing, with the haves barricaded in gated communities and the have-nots at the mercy of criminal gangs. Amid the chaos, a four-year-old girl is abducted while playing in her garden, and what follows is the harrowing, relentless quest of her father -- he is never named in the novel -- who stops at nothing to find her. It's a painful read: Nevill's portrayal of the breakdown of civilisation, mirrored by the father's own spiralling moral crisis, is unflinchingly realistic -- though not without hope. The author says he wanted the novel to amend "the status of climate change from the existential to the very real", and in this Lost Girl succeeds brilliantly. In the first two books of the multi-award winning Ancillary trilogy, Ann Leckie painstakingly built a galaxy-spanning, wide-screen baroque universe in which vast intelligent starships utilised resuscitated corpses as foot soldiers in interstellar conflict, complex political conflict raged between the stars, and hero Breq -- who was once part of a hive-mind starship -- pursued her quest to take revenge on the empress of the Radch empire. In Ancillary Mercy (Orbit, [pound]8.99), Breq, a fleet captain stationed at Athoek Station, finds herself confronted by an old enemy and faces the dilemma of whether to stay or escape and leave the station to its fate. It may sound like a thousand other routine shoot-'em-up space operas, but the author invests her future with fascinating inquiries into the nature of gender, individual identity and colonisation, all achieved with humour and an enviable ability to tell a cracking story. Europe at Midnight (Solaris, [pound]7.99) is the sequel to Dave Hutchinson's critically acclaimed, Arthur C Clarke award-shortlisted Europe in Autumn, a Kafka esque espionage story set in a fractured Europe made up of a hundred conflicted statelets. At the end of the first novel, it's revealed that there exists within Europe a secret, shadowy state. Hutchinson's sequel shuttles between this veiled world and a near-future sovereign England conducting a perpetual war on terror. In London, intelligence officer Jim is investigating a mysterious stabbing at a bus stop, which leads him into a labyrinth of intrigue and deception, while in the pocket universe of "The Campus", security officer Rupert works on a case involving bodies discovered in a river. With seemingly effortless literary flair, Hutchinson reveals how the stories intersect in a complex, unsettling allegory of political manoeuvring, subterfuge and statecraft. In the Gideon Smith trilogy, David Barnett has crafted not only a thoroughly likable hero in the eponymous Smith -- hero of the Empire -- but an engaging entourage of co-conspirators in Maria the mechanical girl, airship pilot Rowena Fanshawe, and alcoholic journalist Aloysius Bent. Gideon Smith and the Mask of the Ripper (Snow, [pound]8.99) sees our heroes tearing around a Victorian London replete with pea soupers, voracious tyrannosaurs and artificial brains. Smith finds himself bereft of his memory after it is removed by an old adversary, and faces death at every turn while on the trail of Jack the Ripper. It's glorious, tongue-in-cheek fun, with cliffhangers aplenty, derring-do, dastardly villains and every trope of the steampunk subgenre used to glorious effect. William Gay published three southern gothic horror novels and a collection of stories in his lifetime. Little Sister Death (Faber, [pound]12.99) was discovered among his papers after his death in 2012. The short, lyrical novel is a reworking of the 1804 Bell Witch haunting in Tennessee, when farmer John Bell and his family moved to a house built on an ancient Indian burial ground and found themselves persecuted by evil spirits. Gay updates the story, with blocked writer David Binder moving to Tennessee and leasing Beale House in order to work on a horror novel. Binder soon becomes fascinated with the curse of the Bell Witch, and suffers the consequences as he and his family fall victim to Beale House's creeping malignancy. Despite its abrupt finale, Little Sister Death is a chilling meditation on the craft of writing and writerly obsession. * Eric Brown's latest novel is Jani and the Greater Game (Solaris). - Eric Brown.
Kirkus Review
From the nexus where Southern writing meets gothic, Gay's (Time Done Been Won't Be No More, 2010, etc.) posthumous novel is a reimagining of a 19th-century Tennessee Hill Country legend. It's the early 1980s, and David Binder, a Tennessee boy living in Chicago, has been scrabbling along with factory jobs to support his wife and baby while working on a novel. A publisher buys the book, but its success is more literary than commercial. Next comes writer's block. David's agent suggests genre fiction: "Write something we can sell to the paperback house. Write a horror novel." Seeking inspiration, he stumbles upon The Beale Haunting, a 19th-century Tennessee ghost story. What follows is a mixture of Flannery O'Connor and Stephen King as David heads south, wife and daughter in tow, and learns that the isolated Beale house still stands. He takes a six-month lease. The narrative moves back and forth in time, and Gay's gut-wrenching opening pages, in which a doctor is kidnapped to tend a birth at the Beale house circa 1785, are written in the fire and blood of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. David grows ever more obsessive as he taps into "a dark malignancy in the bowels of the house." Gay paints with words"The moonshine was black and silver, blurred from hours of darkness like an ink sketch left in the rain"and draws scenes radiating a hard-earned vision of rural Southern life, like a whittler with "soft, curling shavings mounding delicately in the lap of his overalls" or a sharecropper who finds himself "lawed off" the land he's been working after a fight with his landlord. As apparitions appear, Gay's story weaves connections between past and present; soon Binder forgets his book and becomes obsessed with the dark mystery nestled in "some foreign province of the heart." More poetic than horrific, this novel is a contemplation of place and people, belief and cultureas if Faulkner had written The Shining. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
THERE ARE TWO DOGS in Stephen King's fat new collection, THE BAZAAR OF BAD DREAMS (Scribner, $30). Both of them die. You expect there to be a certain amount - well, a lot - of death in a King book, and he does his best, as ever, to deliver the mortal goods. What's unusual about the tales in this volume is how many of its deaths are ordinary, mundane sorts of demises: deaths by cancer or heart failure or car accident or simple, non-supernatural homicide. Sure, in "Mile 81," the long, nearly self-parodic horror story that kicks off the book, a few people are sucked into a mysteriously voracious station wagon at an abandoned rest stop, and some, in later yarns, meet their ends with the help of otherworldly agencies: a sand dune on which the names of the soon to be dead are written, a "bad little kid" who doesn't age and who drives his victims to suicide - that kind of Kingian thing. But to a surprising extent King tries to play it straight in this collection. And that seems to make him a little nervous. (His readers know how it feels.) In the chatty introduction and head notes the author supplies here, as he often does in his collections, King addresses his "Constant Reader" in an uncharacteristically defensive, sometimes even self-deprecatory tone. He says things like this: "I may be a Professional Writer to the I.R.S. when I file my tax return, but in creative terms, I'm still an amateur, still learning my craft." And this: "The point is, you write some scary stories and you're like the girl who lives in the trailer park on the edge of town: You get a reputation." And this: "The term genre holds very little interest for me." And, maybe most tellingly, this, in his gloss on a story that draws on his own experience of pain and rehabilitation: "Like several other stories in this book, 'The Little Green God of Agony' is a search for closure. But, like all the stories in this book, its principal purpose is to entertain. Although life experiences are the basis of all stories, I'm not in the business of confessional fiction." No, he really isn't, and the reason "The Little Green God of Agony" is one of the strongest stories in "The Bazaar of Bad Dreams" is that in this one, at least, King finds a serviceable horror metaphor for what's on his mind, rather than trying to express it more directly. There's quite a bit of territory in between what King sneeringly calls "confessional fiction" and the sort of powerful, disturbing genre fiction that, at his best, he writes as well as any American ever has, but on the evidence of this book he's still just driving around aimlessly on that long highway, looking for a place to rest. The more realistic stories here don't carry much conviction, and all but a handful of the fantastic ones feel a bit desperate, as if he were trying too hard to "entertain." The better stories seem like oddities, one-offs. There's a nice, gleefully dark tall tale about baseball, called "Blockade Billy," and a funny, spooky piece of Internet-era satire, "Obits," about a writer of death notices for a snarky Gawker-like website who discovers, to his uneasily mixed horror and delight, that he can cause people's deaths merely by writing their obituaries in advance. It's a writer's power fantasy and a writer's nightmare, and it fits perfectly in this book, in which Stephen King, still learning, seems ambivalent about his own creative powers, uncertain how he feels about staying on in that trailer park. Once, stories like "The Little Green God of Agony" came to him regularly, and his writing showed the joy he felt receiving them. But that was in another country, and besides, the dog is dead. King started writing young, and he's been at it for a long time. His first novel, "Carrie," came out in 1974, when he was 26, and he's barely paused for breath since. When William Gay's first novel, "The Long Home," was published, in 1999, its author was in his late 50s. He didn't have the time for self-doubt. Two more novels and three collections of short stories and nonfiction appeared before his death, at 70, in 2012, and now a third novel, LITTLE SISTER DEATH (Dzanc, $26.95), has surfaced, a lovely small vessel of unease salvaged from a deep river. Gay wasn't a horror writer as such, more a lyrical, word-drunk conjurer of everyday dreads, in the Southern Gothic tradition of Carson McCullers and Davis Grubb; the title and the epigraph of "Little Sister Death" are from Faulkner. But he has a supernatural tale to tell here, a version of the Bell Witch, a backcountry legend of his native Tennessee. In this short, intense novel, the name has become Beale, and the ghostly details have been changed and embellished, but the terrain, Gay's home ground, is the same, and the mood of malevolence is as thick as the air on a hot day in the American South. The lush prose suits the atmosphere. Gay moves back and forth in time as his hero, a young writer named David Binder, investigates the local legend. Binder, who is a classic asking-for-it horror-story fool, moves himself, his wife and his young daughter into the old Beale house in order to, you know, stimulate his creativity and is predictably undone - though not in a predictable way. What happens to him is worse than the grisly fates that usually befall the luckless heroes of horror fiction: worse than death. "Little Sister Death" is in fact less about death than it is about what the fear of death does to the soul. Late in the novel, Gay stops the story cold for a few paragraphs to describe what it feels like for Binder, his pregnant wife and his daughter to spend every waking moment anticipating something they can't name and can hardly imagine. "Every day was waiting," he writes, "every day was like life lived in airline terminals, bus stations, the waiting rooms of expensive specialists in terminal diseases." The whole county, going through a dry spell, seems to feel that way, in abeyance: "Some days dawned with the mocking promise of rain but the sun hanging over the eastern field withdrew it, the dew vanishing, the bog along the lowland almost instantly sucked into nothingness until all there was was a malevolent red sun tracking across the horizon into a sky gone marvelously blue and absolutely cloudless." Whatever the Beale Witch is, its curse is pervasive. "That place gives me the all-overs," one character says about the Beale property. That's a fair description of the effect of "Little Sister Death." The writing life of William Sloane was even shorter than William Gay's. Sloane's only novels, "To Walk the Night" and "The Edge of Running Water," appeared in 1937 and 1939, and then, still in his early 30s, he just stopped. (He spent the remaining 35 years of his life as an editor and a publisher.) These terrific books are now being reissued together in a volume called THE RIM OF MORNING (New York Review, paper, $18.95), with an introduction by Stephen King. As King notes, both stories have elements of science fiction and mystery, but, he concludes, "I would argue that these are essentially horror novels." He's right. Sloane's kind of horror doesn't much resemble King's, though, or anyone else's. "To Walk the Night" and "The Edge of Running Water" are elegant and serenely paced, and they're light on both the overt shocks of a King story and the overheated prose of a weird tale by Poe or Lovecraft; Sloane's manner is patient, gentlemanly. What terrifies us, finally, in both these books is the vastness of our ignorance of the universe. In "To Walk the Night," two young men, having returned to their alma mater for a football weekend, decide to visit their old physics professor after the game and find him dead in his laboratory, burning with a strange fire: "Clear, white, silent, flickering as fast as a snake's tongue, writhing like streamers of kelp in a tide race." (That's about as shock-/ ing, and as purple, as Sloane's writing gets.) The questions, naturally, are what happened to the unfortunate scientist and why. One of the young men, a scientist himself, thinks he can find the answers; the other, the narrator, becomes increasingly sure that it would be better not to. And in any event, the answers, when they come, are only partial, and lead to larger, darker enigmas that, in the end, the narrator is relieved to admit he'll never be able to solve. As in the best ghost stories, the mystery isn't so much resolved as it is allowed to trail off suggestively into the ether, and good riddance to it. That's the basic narrative philosophy of "The Edge of Running Water," too, which is also ostensibly about the limits of science and is also at heart a ghost story. The narrator of this one, another sensibly wary young man, begins his weird monologue with a mournful sort of urgency. "The man for whom this story is told may or may not be alive," he writes. "If he is, I do not know his name, where he lives, or anything at all about him." (King rates this "as good an opener as I've ever read in my life.") There's a bit more action in "Edge," and the primary setting is a lonely house in Maine - both reasons, perhaps, for King's preferring it to the earlier novel. But the tone, of quiet awe, is identical, and so is the zero-gravity chill it leaves the reader with at the end, a sense of floating free in the epistemological dark. Sloane's novels may or may not be, as King claims, "actual works of literature," but they are at the very least uncommonly beautiful and distinctive pieces of (apologies) genre fiction. The horror stories of Thomas Ligotti, however, may be peculiar enough to qualify as "actual" literature: They clearly obey impulses that have little to do with entertainment, and sometimes feel indifferent even to story. A few years ago, Ligotti told an interviewer: "For my part, I don't care for stories that are just stories. I feel there's something missing from them. What's missing for me is the presence of an author or, more precisely, an author's consciousness." The stories in his 1985 and 1991 collections SONGS OF A DEAD DREAMER and GRIMSCRIBE, (Penguin, paper, $17), now reissued in a single volume, do not lack that authorial consciousness, and a frightening consciousness it is. The voices in his tales are, more often than not, those of men who expect very little of life: no spiritual meaning, certainly, no pleasure beyond the occasional sardonic chuckle, no beauty save in the grotesque and the anomalous, and no good end. They believe that "the most innocuous phenomena should eventually find their way from good dreams into bad, or from bad dreams into those that were wholly abysmal." One character, in search of "a reality so saturated with its own presence that it had made a leap into the unreal," finds in an old book "his longsought abode of exquisite disfigurations." He may be a madman, or he may not; Ligotti isn't sure, so he leaves it up to us. There are powerful echoes of Lovecraft in Ligotti, both in his willing embrace of demented physical and mental landscapes and in his often ornate, archaic-sounding prose. Ligotti is a much more accomplished stylist, though; you can detect traces of a higher, more self-aware decadence in his manipulations of pulp hyperbole, a hint of Lautréamont in the Lovecraftian perfume. The closest thing to a conventional genre story in these collections is a creepy little item called "The Last Feast of Harlequin," in which an academic social anthropologist - author of "The Clown Figure in American Media" - travels to the upper Midwest for an obscure local festival and stumbles onto something rather stranger than he'd anticipated, a cult of voluntary zombies. "Their ideal," he writes, "was a melancholy half-existence consecrated to all the many shapes of death and dissolution." Yes, that gives the story away, but with Ligotti that matters rather less than it would with, say, Stephen King. King, the great entertainer, needs the story as the comedian needs the joke, and when he can't quite deliver it he dies (in the comedian's sense). King is a master of horror, though. When inspiration fails, he has the technique to fake it. Thomas Ligotti is a master of a different order, practically a different species. He probably couldn't fake it if he tried, and he never tries. He writes like horror incarnate. TERRENCE RAFFERTY, the author of "The Thing Happens: Ten Years of Writing About the Movies," is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
