Unspeakable Horror!

Measuring up against the granddaddies and great-granddaddies of the haunted house genre – think Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story The Fall of the House of Usher, Henry James' 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw, or Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House – is no easy feat for the most seasoned of writers. Most can hope for some semblance of readable mediocrity, passable works that are more homage than reinvention. It’s rare indeed that modern fiction stacks up against these iconic stories of ghostly hauntings, but once in awhile someone takes a stab at the genre and a modern horror classic is born. Richard Matheson did it in 1971 with Hell House. Stephen King did it later that same decade with The Shining, followed by Peter Straub who did it with the appropriately titled Ghost Story in the eighties. All were updates on a classic idea that both modernized and reinvigorated while retaining the timelessness of these great works of literature. First-time novelist Sarah Langan joins that elite list with her debut, The Keeper.

With advance accolades coming from the likes of Straub and Ramsey Campbell, it’s easy to be caught up in the promotional blitz of such a book – even easier to be let down against the backdrop of such hype. But Langan doesn’t disappoint with a debut so entrancing, so unnerving, and so downright chilling that readers will feel as if they’ve witnessed the birth of a bona fide classic and the beginning of a literary career of the King-Straub-Campbell caliber by the time they read the final sentence. If any genre book should carry a “guaranteed good read” label, this or any other year, it’s The Keeper.

In The Keeper, Langan tells the tragic story of Bedford, a small Maine town that pins its collective hopes on big business commercialism only to find itself sucked dry by the vampire of corporate America. As the story opens, the Clott Paper Mill, once regarded as the corporate savior of Bedford, has closed its doors. Having depleted the town of its resources and leaving in its wake a pending environmental disaster, the corporation that once ran the mighty paper production plant has turned its back on the denizens of Bedford, leaving the townsfolk jobless and hopeless and mired in the alcohol, drugs, and hollow sexuality that accompanies their newfound abject poverty.

Like all good small towns in literature, Bedford has some nasty secrets – lots of them. Under Langan’s expert pen, these secrets fester and grow like a deformed fetus in the town’s symbolic womb, here embodied in the character of Susan Marley, equal parts resident misfit and town whore. Victimized as a child, Susan has retreated into herself, aimlessly wandering the streets of Bedford, trading sex for rent, and regarded by most as crazy. But, as the residents of Bedford are soon to learn upon her tragic death, Susan Marley is also a supernatural vessel, one that collects and harbors all of the town’s ugly secrets and those of the Clott Paper Mill. As an apocalyptic rainfall begins, those who remain behind in Bedford are plagued by increasingly foreboding nightmares, dreams of Susan Marley and an otherworldly revenge against a town that turned its back on her and itself.

The Keeper insinuates itself into the reader’s subconscious through the use of a fully realized ensemble of characters which allows Langan to alternate points of view and power through a richly layered, yet deceptively simple plot. Langan capably sketches her characters with a refreshing realism, avoiding cliché and pastiche. Few writers can so adroitly juggle an ensemble of characters like Langan does here in The Keeper, each with an original and distinct voice. Although her three-dimensional creations are full of flaws, simultaneously likable and unlikable at times, they are never without an empathetic quality that causes the reader to be invested from first mention. Deftly, Langan conveys the complex dichotomy of the imperfect humanity of her characters:

Susan squeezed harder, and the voices stopped. He looked in her eyes, and he saw his own reflection. He saw himself through Susan’s eyes. In her left eye was a man to whom she was grateful. In her right eye was a man who had betrayed her. These men stood side by side. One man was bigger, but then a drinking man’s devils are always stronger than the angels of his nature.

Most remarkable about The Keeper is its delectable mix of subtlety and overt horror. Langan skillfully layers on the atmosphere and mood and knows just when to start to peel back those layers in an escalating rhythm of dread and urgency. The Keeper builds in momentum like a cauldron of boiling water, with Langan stoking the fire beneath the pot by exploring every crevice of her atmospheric setting and developing her characters. Her prose is literary and fluid, its lushness never detracting from the gut-punch intensity of the horror at hand. Amid the horrific images Langan creates on her pages, there is also a sheer beauty to her language:

She had not slept well since Susan’s death and her thoughts were increasingly difficult to string together. They were names disjointed from their faces that fluttered like the thin wings of moths in a somnambulist’s dream.

Reading the final pages of The Keeper, one is reminded of the third act of John Carpenter’s The Fog as the citizens of Antonio Bay try to escape the encroaching titular horror. Langan employs a similar plot device here in her denouement, and, like Carpenter’s film, it works because the author imbues the characters with a commonality of cause – survival. As the imperfect populace of Bedford is affected by toxins that contaminate the air, toxins that saturate the soil, and toxins that pollute the water, Langan shows us that the most dangerous toxins of all are those within us – secrets that poison the deep wells of the soul.

Order Sarah Langan's The Keeper at Amazon today.