Good reads: "The horror... the horror..."

After a long break from the genre, I read a couple of novels this past year that at least nominally fall into the horror category.

As a teenager, my favorite author was Stephen King.  ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining and The Stand remain touchstones of my early adolescence, and I still own a good chunk of the man’s catalogue, though I shed a few of his thicker and less memorable ’80s and ’90s novels in our 2009 move. I think even the ever-frank King would agree he hit a sort of rhythm in that period where his stories became somewhat formulaic. I’ve continued to enjoy his short-story collections—they’re always a kick, full of tightly-written bite-sized morsels and O. Henry endings—but I stayed away from the novels for a number of years until picking up the well-reviewed Under The Dome last year.

Under The Dome is not, strictly speaking, a horror novel, although a number of horrible things happen in it… it’s more like a mash-up of Our Town and Lord of the Flies, with a bit of ’50s B-movie sci-fi thrown in for seasoning. To wit: an entire small town in rural Maine is suddenly, inexplicably encased in a perfectly clear, almost impenetrable, mile-high dome that cuts it off from the outside world. This offers abundant opportunity for King to do what he does best—examine with a keen eye and ear how ordinary people react under the most extreme circumstances imaginable.

A few near-stereotypes are present—the instinctively heroic military veteran, the devious and megalomaniacal used car magnate, the straight-arrow small-town New England newspaper publisher—but King gives them depth and shading aplenty and comes up with one of his most convincingly horrific creations in the person of Junior Rennie, a small-town bully whose brain tumor turns him into a depraved serial killer even as his manipulating daddy gets him installed him as part of the town’s emergency police force. There were also a couple of twists that I didn’t see coming (although I might have “smoked out” one of them if I’d started watching Breaking Bad before reading the book), and King’s writing feels energized in a way it hasn’t for me in some time.  Under The Dome was a solid read and a keeper. Welcome back, Steve.

Mr. King also supplied a laudatory jacket quote that contributed to my decision to pick up Justin Cronin’s The Passage. Not that I have a constant jones for either post-apocalyptic survival stories or vampires, but when the author of two of the best novels ever written on those particular subjects praises a post-vampire-apocalypse novel, it might be worth a look.

And it was. Cronin, a writer once better known for the literary novels Mary and O’Neil and The Summer Guest (the former a PEN/Hemingway Award winner), dives into the genre with aplomb and recognizes instinctively how to drive this sort of narrative forward in a way that’s both captivating and satisfying. There’s always a necessary balance between answering all of the obvious what-if questions about a world-changing event, while at the same time keeping you engaged with and invested in the characters’ very basic struggles to survive in an extraordinarily hostile world.  Cronin’s insights about how a crumbling modern society might react, and what sort of physical and socio-cultural landscape that reaction might leave behind for the survivors a generation later, are sharp and feel remarkably realistic considering the sci-fi-with-hints-of-supernatural nature of the disaster that strikes humanity.

The ambitious Cronin has declared The Passage to be the opening act of a planned trilogy, and he structures his narrative well for that plan, delivering a finish that satisfies while leaving many more questions and possible directions unexplored for the forthcoming chapters in the story. Count me in.