October has become a month-long national celebration of horror, gore, creepiness, jump-scares, and fear-mongering. No longer do people wait until October 31 to put up the Halloween decorations. I saw one yard decorated with a gigantic skull on September 30, and on nearby Stanley Avenue here in Roanoke, the houses have featured throughout the month spiderwebs, ghosts, jack-o-lanterns, inflatable ghoulies (and at one house, an inflatable Hogwarts castle straddling the sidewalk to the front door), witches, and skeletons. In full October spirit, I’m writing today about two gruesome tales, one true, one fiction, both page-turners.
In an earlier post I mentioned that I wanted to read more by David Grann, and so, prodded by an abundance of television commercials plugging the coming movie from Martin Scorsese, I read Killers of the Flower Moon, another fine work of nonfiction and scrupulous research. Because of oil rights, the Osage Indians in the 1920’s were among the richest people in the United States. Naturally, with the combined power of racism and greed, they became the targets of white people who wanted to get their hands on the Indians’ money. Some of these predators used legal loopholes and became “guardians” of fully capable adult Osage people; these guardians could legally control how much of their own money the Osage could spend, and from there it was an easy step to begin skimming from the reserves in the bank. Others, not content to get some of the money, opted to acquire all of it by arranging for a series of murders that would funnel inherited millions into the pockets of whites who had shrewdly married their way into the Osage culture. It’s a story of appalling treachery—though of course treachery to Native Americans is long-established custom here—but also of great tenacity by Tom White and his team of investigators working for J. Edgar Hoover in the nascent F.B.I.
Grann is an extraordinary reporter for lots of reasons: his limpid style, his ability to evoke an exotic setting economically, his careful research. But what I particularly admire about him is his determination to visit the scene of the crime, so to speak. When he was writing The Wager, he traveled to Patagonia and visited the very island where the British castaways had eked out their survival, and for Killers of the Flower Moon, he traveled to the Osage Nation in Oklahoma and spent time in Pawhuska, the municipality where so much of his story unfolded. His book comes with dozens of photographs of the principal characters and places, and the result for the reader is to be thoroughly educated in a series of outrages perpetrated by many people over many years.
Grann provides the nonfiction horrors. In the new novel Holly Stephen King provides goosebumps no less riveting because they happen to be fiction. Here King puts front-and-center a character he introduced in Mr. Mercedes and has gradually promoted to a starring role: Holly Gibney, the obsessive-compulsive, quiet, brilliant, lovable, and unlikely detective who has, in early middle age, already encountered a lifetime of evil, twisted, terrifying characters. In this novel, as he did in Mr. Mercedes and its sequel, Finders Keepers, King avoids the supernatural to deliver plenty of horror of the entirely human sort. As King has aged, his villains have aged as well. He assembled a terrifying group of ostensibly harmless old codgers in Dr. Sleep, a senior-citizens brigade of vampiric predators who kill for the sake of the life force that escapes the body after death by slow torture. Shudder. Now in Holly he’s given us a couple of octogenarian academics who happen to practice cannibalism. That’s not much of a spoiler. We know who they are from the outset, and while it takes a couple of pages to establish their motives for grabbing people (they use a technique that works very well for Jamie Gumb in The Silence of the Lambs), they waste no time in establishing their bona fides as dangerous and nasty.
King employs his regular stable of actors in the Holly canon, particularly Jerome and Barbara Robinson, brother and sister who have served as vital assistants to Holly as she unravels the bizarre mysteries that come her way. In this book I might quibble that Jerome and Barbara enjoy unbelievable success as novice writers, but if anybody knows the publishing business, it’s Stephen King, and if he wants to grant these two talented youngsters some credulity-straining rewards for their writing, then I’m willing to buy his story. The book was 450 pages long but took only a couple of days for me to burn through, and now that it’s over, I can declare that Mr. King has once more delivered a superior entertainment that also works nicely as social commentary. Stephen King is our own Charles Dickens, a writer who knows how to get us emotionally responding to indelible characters even as he holds the mirror up to a flawed society. Dickens, however, tends to write about delectable Christmas feasts and hearty daily fare, while in this book in particular Mr. King gives us all too many reasons to skip a meal or two.