Book review: Mr Shivers

Published on Sunday 7 February 2010 10:34

MR SHIVERS Robert Jackson Bennett Orbit, £12.99

'HORROR" has a bit of an image problem, and not just because the jacket covers tend to be crawling with eyeballs, blood, sharp things and spot-glosses. I've lost count of the number of horror novels I've started, thinking it might be interesting to review one, and ended up throwing across the room either because of something salaciously sadistic being inflicted on a female character or because the prose has degenerated into a broth of screams, exclamation marks and arcane names.

Mr Shivers, the debut novel by Robert Jackson Bennett, is a brave and mostly successful attempt at a "serious" horror novel, and whatever cavils I might have, I'll await his next book with bated breath.

Set during the Great Depression, the novel opens with a laconic loner, Connelly, drifting out of the dust bowl and inquiring in a run-down bar if anyone has seen a scarred man passing through. Among the dispossessed "Okies", the rail-road jumping hobos and the down-at-heel carnies he meets more and more people who have lost something to the scarred man.

As he falls in with a group of enigmatic crusaders – a former preacher, a Jewish immigrant, and a Chicago factory worker – the novel performs the classic double-twist of good horror writing. The man they all seek, the titular Mr Shivers, might not be human at all. And they might become something less than men themselves as the quest for vengeance bites deeper and harder.

The period setting is evoked well, and reminded me more than once of the untimely cancelled TV series Carnivale. It hints at allegorical import, and the atmosphere of despair, panic and almost divine retribution on the land makes the characters' willingness to give up everything psychologically convincing.

One of the best portentous speeches sums it up well: "They say these hungry times are a curse. Like they expect things to always be safe and this hunger is new and strange… But that's the strange thing. That's the new thing. Living comfortably. That's strange."

The prose is pretty functional – the italics in the quote above wouldn't need to be there in a more assured novel – and the clever use of "hobo signs" throughout the novel should have been more distinctive and integrated.

Horror novels tend to be fat, and Mr Shivers could have used an extra 60 pages at the start to lull the reader into a false sense of security before the nightmares begin. But the final third is epic, as the plot becomes primal and mythic rather than a series of jack-in-the-box shocks. Horror can explore things that the other genres can't, and Bennett is a clear name to watch in the field.

&#149 This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 07 February 2010