Horror & Crime: Analyzing The Caretaker of Lorne Field
Part 2
The photo accompanying this article has nothing to do with the subject. Earlier this week my wife and I took a friend’s dog (Missy) for a walk, and Missy, after pouncing on this stick, carried it up and down Water Street here in Warren RI. And since she was so proud of it, I thought it only right to show her with her prize!
I’m going to start this second article off with discussing whether my novel The Caretaker of Lorne Field can be considered modern horror fiction. Below is an excerpt that I feel is representative of the style/prose of the book:
Sheriff Dan Wolcott tried to remain patient while he sat in the front seat of his Jeep and listened to Jack Durkin, his face showing the same patient smile as if he were listening to the ranting of an elderly person suffering from dementia. After a while, though, some color tinged his angular, narrow face and before too long his large ears were burning red.
“Jack,” he said, “we’re not going to publicly hang some boys for throwing tomatoes at you.”
“They violated the contract,” Jack Durkin argued stubbornly, his own face redder than the sheriff’s. He held the contract up in front of him and pointed a thick finger at it. “It says right here anyone interfering with the Caretaker’s sacred duties needs to be hung publicly for all the town to see.” Jack Durkin found the clause and read it again to the sheriff for the sixth time, his voice shaking with anger.
“Jack, let’s be reasonable. If you really want to make a big deal over some kids throwing tomatoes, then fine, I’ll ask around and, if I can find the kids, I’ll talk to their parents. Maybe see if we can arrange for them to do some of your weeding as punishment. How’s that sound?”
Jack Durkin was too furious to talk. All the color he had bled out of his face leaving it sickly white. Sheriff Dan Wolcott watched him for a while, then shrugged. “I’m sorry some teenage boys did that to you, Jack, I truly am, but that’s what teenage boys do.” Wolcott paused to shake his head, his thin patronizing smile shifting back into place. “Look, why don’t you go back inside your house, clean yourself off, maybe take a nice hot bath and try to relax. I’ll talk to some of the teenagers around town, put a little fear in them and make sure this doesn’t happen again. How’s that sound?”
“You can’t just turn your back on the contract,” Jack Durkin forced out, his voice harsh, barely above a whisper. “This is a sacred document. You have an obligation.”
The prose is stark, gritty, realistic, with a cynical voice and a hard-boiled edge—more of what you’d find in crime fiction than the fluid, highly atmospheric, and often times lush and linguistically baroque prose found in today’s horror fiction. The pacing in the novel is what you’d find in MCT (Mystery & Crime & Thriller) writing instead of the more surrealistic and speculative storytelling found in modern horror fiction.
Gore is also treated very differently in this book than in modern horror fiction. Modern horror fiction often uses extreme gore, reveling in it, as a way to create visceral reactions, dread, and a numbness in the reader. MCT (Mystery/Crime/Thriller) writing can be violent, shockingly so, but the violence is for impact. There are always exceptions, such as Derek Raymond’s I was Dora Suarez, as well as the serial-killer subgenre, but MCT writing tends to treat gore in a minimalistic way, often explaining the impact of a violent act with a single sentence. The Caretaker of Lorne Field has little actual onscreen violence, and what is there is dealt with similarly to MCT writing.
The threat in my novel is specific, even if the existence of the threat may be ambiguous to the reader. In modern horror fiction the threats are frequently amorphous and open to interpretation.
Modern horror frequently uses certain writing techniques that are not only absent in The Caretaker of Lorne Field but are considered to be the antithesis of good MCT writing (no judgement, just stating the distinction between the two types of writing). These techniques include:
1) The use of a rapid-fire, fragmented lines to create an unsettling rhythm.
2) A repetitive loop to make the prose feel flat and hyper-focused as a wat to create a sense of claustrophobic dread for the reader.
3) Create an erratic cadence to once again create an unsettling rhythm.
4) Prose as a monotonous drone, once again to create an unsettling feeling.
5) Omitting chapters and playing games with white space, typography, and page layout.
Modern horror fiction often creates an unsettled state with the focus on immersive dread. The prose in The Caretaker of Lorne Field doesn’t do this. It also lacks the frantic and dramatic stylings of a typical horror narrator. The point of the prose isn’t to induce feelings of disgust. There’s no stream-of consciousness. No erratic pacing. The prose, style, and rhythm of my novel fits squarely as an MCT novel.
So how does The Caretaker of Lorne Field fit as modern horror fiction? Modern horror fiction often has ambiguous endings, and there are certainly a lot of readers who feel the same about my novel (an opinion I don’t share). Protagonists are often isolated and disempowered, and could there possibly be a protagonist more isolated and disempowered than Jack Durkin? There is also a strong focus within the novel of Jack’s psychological trauma and vulnerability. It’s rural setting, the generational burden that Jack carries, the fact that Jack’s belief in Aukowies may be delusion or truth, Jack’s growing alienation within his family, and the eroding myth of the Aukowies within Jack’s community all also move the novel into the realm of a modern horror novel.