Maynard's House by Herman Raucher (1980): Girl from the North Country

[The tree] was gnarled and twisted and barren. It sported no foliage, not a sprig of green or a somnolent bud waiting for April. Nor was there snow on any of its branches. It was just stuck, apparently lifeless. And even in that sunlit afternoon where the evergreens shot mammoth black shadows across the snow, this tree cast no shadow at all.

Should I be surprised that such an evocative piece of horror fiction should spring from the pen of a literal "Mad man"? During his stint in the New York advertising world during the Fifties and Sixties, author Herman Raucher (b. 1928, Brooklyn) wrote plays and for television, then hit the jackpot with the autobiographical script and novelization for the hugely successful 1971 coming-of-age film Summer of '42 (for all y'all horror film fans out there, this is what little Danny is watching on TV in an early scene of Kubrick's Shining).

Dell Books, 1976 paperback

I've neither read the book nor seen the movie of '42, but they made Raucher a heavy hitter, and heavy hitting is what he's doing in his 1980 Vietnam-by-way-of-winter-Gothic, Maynard's House (Berkley paperback edition, Sept 1981, cover artist unknown). Should've known a man who can plumb and create the unspoken desires of the American consumer can also plumb darker recesses as well: Maynard's House is a gripping vintage read of low-key horror and mounting suspense.

Twenty-three-year-old Austin Fletcher is on a chugging train heading into the wilds of the great frozen state of Maine in the winter of '72-'73 when Maynard's House opens. Freshly home from the conflict in Vietnam, he's on his way to a house on eight acres of land in the god-knows-where town of Belden, said house having been willed to him on an entirely legal scrap of worn notebook paper by the late Maynard Whittier. Maynard is—was—a fellow young servicemen who, and Austin's not exactly sure how, had befriended Austin but then had the unfortunate luck of being killed in the line of duty.

Death had come quickly. Incoming mail, just one round round. Probably fired off by a Cong infiltrator who came upon the abandoned mortar in the brush and wasn't all that sure how to use it or where he was aiming it. Things like that happened every day. Luck of the draw. Spin of the wheel. Something like that.
 

Ah, the familiar tang of Vietnam-era fatalism and nonchalance about death and fate. With neither man having much in the way of family, the house will become a locus of their relationship, even after death. Austin is the kind of young man who hasn't made much of an impression on the world, wherever he went in life, he was never missed when he left. But maybe here, in Maynard's house, he can begin to live...

1980 hardcover from Putnam's

Upon arriving in Belden, Austin meets Jack Meeker, local mailman and general store owner, face like a favorite leather wallet, teeth like a barn door in an Andrew Wyeth painting, who speaks perfect Maine-accented English. He introduces Austin to not only the other men around but also to the delicate nature of personal interaction thereabout. You know these types of country men, literal to a fault, taciturn and distrustful, ornery, quick to find fault in others, full of assumption that everyone does things the way they do and thinks they're fools when they don't. "Gettin' a little testy there, Austin," Meeker says at one point early on when Austin grows a little weary of local know-it-alls. "That'll be the wrong attitude for a man let out heah to his own devices." 

Eventually Meeker takes Austin to Maynard's house, crouched low and gray and brown like a cat, its tail pressed against the cushiony hill, its mind semi-shut in a winter nap... a low-slung thing, cedar-shingled and loosely built, seemingly haphazard yet somehow indestructible. Then Meeker tells him that nearby is a shadowless witch's tree, where 250 years before a woman was hanged for being a witch, and her house—now rebuilt as Maynard's house—burned to the foundation. Thus begins a short discussion of the hows and wherefores of a witch's powers: "A witch can occupy a house and do things to ya if you cross its threshold," Meeker explains, noting that a witch can manipulate people. Austin isn't very much convinced, but agrees that a respectful awareness of these beliefs is in order.

1980 UK paperback

Austin settles into his old friend's house, marveling at how well-stocked it is, admiring its huge library (lots of Thoreau, who becomes a kind of intellectual beacon throughout) and tools and decor, seeing into Maynard's character and nature. Adventures with a deer, with the outhouse, and even a colorful hunter tracking a bear ensue, all delivered in Raucher's hale, hearty style. Austin learns about local history, of legends about woodland sprites called Minnawickies that dance on an outcropping known as the Devil's Dancing Rock—more notes of oddness and unease. On an old wooden plank hung up as ornamentation, he discovers messages carved in it by previous inhabitants about their lives, going back a hundred years. These were not happy people, it seems, and their scratchings leave Austin unsettled: This house is not fit. It never was. Nor will it burn. To hell with it.

The mood lightens some with the appearance of Ara and Froom, a 16-year-old girl and her little brother. Their origins are unclear, but they seem to be from a family living somewhere in the countryside, and they traipse through the snow to play pranks on Austin. He and the lovely Ara begin a smart-alecky banter while Froom throws snowballs in the background. They show up now and then, while Austin attempts to become proficient in his new homestead. Slowly he develops feelings for her, lamenting her youth. The only thing she wasn't that he wished she was—was older, but Never in his life had he been exposed to such simple beauty, to such a fine winter creature, to such innocent sensuality.

1981 UK hardcover

Vietnam always hovers in the background and at times in the foreground... like when Maynard begins to appear to Austin and the two converse in airy philosophical conundrums. Raucher highlights the duality of the house: by day something out of Robert Frost, a cozy Christmas card setting, but at night it becomes Poe and Hawthorne, terror and shadow. Austin struggles mightily to make this home his own but it may prove too much for him. Vietnam has wounded him more than he thinks.

Soon comes the realization that rather than living in or with the house, he has to live against it: Fuck you, house! he exclaims at one point. Then, people begin to die, leaving Austin virtually stranded, unable to discern what's real, what's illusion, and whether that pointy witch hat tumbling through the snow is able to kill him...
 

Raucher's a pro, writing rich, evocative prose perfect for the lonely scenario; you can feel the cold winds blowing, Austin's endless struggles with both what he can see and what he can't, the darkness settling down into the snowy trees outside... and whatever may lurk there. Welcome touches of earthy humor and sensuality give the novel a mainstream feel, but Raucher can certainly lay on the eerie shivers when necessary, applying different tones of unease, ambiguity, or the outright supernatural. Raucher's given readers a true winter Gothic, none of the predatory beasts he knew to be outside came close to matching the fear he had of the apparitions he knew to be inside his house and his mind.

While it has more on its mind than just scaring you, the novel's wintry, isolated setting and uncanny erasing of the lines between life and death, memory and prophecy, reality and illusion, provide plenty of quality reading for thoughtful horror fans who dig character-driven stories you can take your time with. It all builds to a climax of repulsive, subterranean horror goodness that lingers through to the last haunting page, over and over and over. In short, gang, Maynard's House is a must-visit.

Koko by Peter Straub (1988): Born Down in a Dead Man's Town

In a way the Vietnam War was an Eighties war, much as we revisited it in that decade and as its after-effects began to be confronted in our most popular culture. After 1975, people weren't eager to talk about it; the wound still fresh, the stitches still in place. Of course there had been books and movies in the previous decade, like The Deer Hunter and Dispatches, Going After Cacciato and Coming Home, but an Eighties character such as Rambo (and even a performer like Bruce Springsteen from that era) more embodied a perfect wish fulfillment fantasy for the decade of excess, as the damaged national psyche transformed itself into oiled, striated, male musculature pushed to the limit of human endurance. We're back, baby! Nothing's gonna stop us now.

Peter Straub's entry into this cultural reckoning of the conflict was his ambitious 1988 novel Koko (Signet Books paperback, July 1989, cover by Robert Korn). One of the most ubiquitous of all 1980s paperback novels found in many a used bookstore's horror section, Koko's cover art of primary colors and thick, high-contrast spine has captured my eye for years. It wasn't ever very high on my to-read list, however, as I knew it was more mainstream thriller and that it dealt with Vietnam, which was not my thing at all when I was in my early twenties (despite the fact that I was devouring films like the aforementioned Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now, but that was because they happened to be great '70s movies, not because they were about Vietnam). How glad I am that I finally took the leap and read it!

 

 Straub in 1988

Straub's book is about four men, Vietnam vets who served together, on a journey, circling around a secret, a secret unknowable and unimaginable, a secret that may not even have happened: a Schrodinger's cat event of battletime horror. Michael Poole, Harry Beevers, Tina Pumo, Conor Linklater: a children's doctor whose marriage is breaking up, an asshole lawyer, a NYC restaurateur in over his head, an unambitious carpenter. In shades of Straub's horror breakthrough Ghost Story (1979), these men live their lives around a horrible event; in this case, something that happened in a cave in the Vietnamese village of Ia Thuc during the war, akin to the real-life My Lai massacre. Koko opens with a powerful, resonant, emotional scene of the men reuniting after more than a decade in Washington DC to visit the Vietnam Memorial:

For Poole, the actual country of Vietnam was now just another place... its history and culture had briefly, disastrously intersected ours. But the actual country of Vietnam was not Vietnam; that was here, in these American names and faces.

 

Having learned of a serial killer named Koko in southeast Asia who may be one of their fellow vets from their old combat unit, the four men begin an international search: Beevers, Poole, and Linklater travel to Asia to track him down; Pumo remains in New York and deals with the demons of restaurant management and a one-night stand that goes horribly wrong. Visiting Singapore and Bangkok, the three men begin searching for answers no one can give them, carousing East Asian bars and whorehouses, being taken to secret shows in dingy basements where humans are killed for expensive thrills, plumbing their own natures in that Heart of Darkness manner. These colorful travelogue sequences are interspersed with scenes from the war, and we meet the other soldiers in their unit: Manuel Dengler, Tim Underhill, Victor Spitalny... who is Koko? What is Koko? Fortunate reader, you will learn.

In the eerie and violent chapters featuring the title character, Koko's psychic state reminds me very much of Francis Dollarhyde in Red Dragon: the cunning, the mania, the grandiosity, the sick poetry of it, and this bit about "the nearness of ultimate things." It's a dead-eyed glare, an interiorized fantasy world so powerful that he must remake the real world in trauma. While Straub does not trade in the same forensic ingenuity as that Thomas Harris title, the madnesses of men and its origins are kindred: "God's hand hung in the air, pointing at him."

By far my favorite sequence—in a novel filled with great sequences—is a trip to Milwaukee to track down Spitalny's and Dengler's families. This visit to a sad, broken, gloomy town to speak with sad, broken, gloomy people is a glimpse into a part of America that isn't a beacon of shining hope: these are people with petty approaches to life, who exile themselves from the main street of life and gloat over past pain, who never seem to grow out of the small-minded provincialites, who cripple themselves and indulge in the small sick sadistic voice that whispers of their inadequacy and vanity. Small-town America, as horror reminds us over and over and over, is rife with the evil of banality.

One of the criticisms/complaints I hear against Straub is that he is long-winded, pretentious, ponderous, boring. I mean, I guess I can see that. He writes big books and he's not just writing scary ones; he's after bigger prey. So yes, Straub, for all his expansive depiction of human nature in its deeps and valleys, also often obscures certain details from the reader, leaving them to ponder if they missed a sentence or phrase or snatch of dialogue somewhere along the line. No, that's not it: Straub uses implication, a shaded eye, to keep some aspects of the narrative in doubt. And indeed, the central trauma at the center—that village massacre involving these men when they were young soldiers—is open to interpretation.

What I'm saying is: Straub doesn't always tell you everything you need to know. Is this a literary pretense? Is it lazy writing? Or is it because the truth, for all we venerate it, is unknowable, unfixed, changeable through the stories we tell? Not for nothing has Straub created a character who has written the short stories Straub has already written ("Blue Rose" and "The Juniper Tree") and published. Meta-fiction has been hot for a long time now, authors winking at us from inside the pages of their own work, but Straub's version is not whimsical, ironic, jokey, or cute; it simply is. We write our stories every day; this is as commonplace an idea as the fact that sometimes an author doesn't even know what his story is about. So let's keep things interesting by keeping some things in the dark. But illumination can come from an unexpected source: as one character thinks to himself while reading a paperback novel called The Dead Zone during his travels: "Improbability and violence overflowed flowed from everyday life, and Stephen King seemed to know that." That's good stuff.

To readers who like their horror graphic and nasty, I'd say there's nothing here for you; this is not that kind of novel. To readers who like to step off into a larger landscape of human tragedy, Koko is recommended. Straub is not trying to scare the reader; there are no attempts at jump scares or spine chills. These fears dissipate in the morning light. "The nearness of ultimate things" he notes again and again, an existential mantra that implies a whole host of misery and revelation: those are frightening things in and of themselves.

 

 

This is the kind of full-on novel that takes up a lot of space in your head; this review has touched on only a portion of what it offers. Straub's fine and thoughtful prose, rich vein of humanity, eye and ear for marital discord, and ability to launch widescreen emotional horrors of deep, profound impact, will satisfy the discerning reader. For such a thick tome (600 pages), the story moves along weightlessly, fleet-footed yet penetrating, disturbing but empathetic, never bogged down in useless detail or dialogue, everything in its right place. The climax is in another unlit cavern in a modern American city, where everything meets one final time, where "eternity happened all at once, backwards and forward."

Reviews found online range from "masterpiece" to "meh," but I can tell from some of those "meh"s that the readers were expecting a giant feast of guttural horror—which Koko surely is not. Two volumes follow in a very loose trilogy: Mystery (1990) and The Throat (1993), and I know little about either, but I've added them to my must-read list. It might not be a perfect novel—perhaps at times its sights are beyond its reach—but for the adventurous horror fan who doesn't mind the occasional foray into non-supernatural madness, who is ready for a huge armored tank of a book that looks into one of America's darkest  eras... Koko is singing a song you'll want to hear.

Couldn't believe Straub himself retweeted me...!