by Dana Brookins
1985 Zebra
When will I ever learn. Every time, I lie to myself. "They're building atmosphere," I say. "This is quiet horror." "It's a slow build, but it will pay off."
I don't know if Zebra had a stack of small town character studies in their slush pile and just threw in a haunted doll or whatever to make it horror, but there are a lot of these in the 80s. Stephen King may have filled too many pages of this for my liking, but at least there's the original intention of writing something scary.
So, Soul-Eater. An anonymous former resident of a small rural town buys some property through an intermediary, moves and installs a house, and gifts it to the town as a museum. A museum of what I couldn't really figure out, but this is a very small town so they're very impressed.
The small town character study is good - a young boy caring for his grandfather, a girl with a deformed foot that the town simultaneously supports and looks down on, the town welfare case, the local newspaper owner with dreams above his station, the repressed single mother who gets off on douches and enemas, and her teenage son who gets off on listening to her.
A psychic boy has flashes of danger. Town folk become obsessed with the house, leading to death for a handful. And we get to the point that there seems to be something scary about to happen, leading to the scary stuff in act three...epilogue. Things return to normal, time passes, things resolve.
But wait! Turns out the house wants the psychic boy. The hidden town benefactor reveals herself as the only character who doesn't make sense, brings the boy to the house, he burns it down, the end. No clue what the house was or why. You can't even say it's haunted, we only know it eat souls because the book tells us.
The prose was fine, though Brookins went out of her way to break my rule against "it's like something out of horror novel" rule. She not only name checks The Shining in a book about a psychic boy and maybe haunted house, she mentions The Haunting of Hill House twice and includes a brief synopsis.
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