Review: KILL CREEK, by Scott Thomas

 

Horror, like humor, is a very delicate narrative substance and even if the two find themselves at the very opposites of the writing scale, they share the need for fine balance and even finer control if one seeks to reach a believable and satisfactory result.  This is indeed the case with Scott Thomas’ Kill Creek, a story that on the surface seems to share many elements with other horror novels (a haunted house, a group of people who enter it and suffer dreadful experiences, their attempts at fighting the evil, and so on), but in the end manages to defy any prediction and to offer a unique reading experience that surpasses even the highest of expectations.  If the information I found on GoodReads about Mr. Thomas is correct, this should be his first novel, which makes it all the more extraordinary for the skill he exhibits with pace and characterization: I will certainly keep an eye on his future production, because here is a quite promising author in the genre.

A group of four horror writers, each different in personality and narrative mode, receives an invitation from Justin Wainwright, the owner of WrightWire – a site dedicated to horror in all its declinations – to spend Halloween night in the Finch House at Kill Creek, a remote Kansas location: the resulting interview with the authors will be streamed online and serve as much-needed publicity for every one of them. And the four need it because, in one way or the other, their careers are at a crossroads.

Sam McGarver, a man saddled with a dark past that has left him scarred in body and mind, is dealing with writer’s block and has accepted a teaching position to help make ends meet; T.C. Moore has become famous for her dark, no-holds-barred, sexually explicit stories, but a recent encounter with the Hollywood executives in charge of the movie from her latest novel angered and unsettled her more than she can deal with; Sebastian Cole is considered the dean of horror writers, inspiring many to follow in his footsteps, yet he feels that his career is at an end; and Daniel Slaughter made a name for himself with YA horror stories laced with a Christian message of redemption and hope, but his audience is dwindling day by day and his publisher is ready to cut him loose.   Each one of them resents Wainwright’s bold-faced summons and the certainty of deception they perceive in his manner, but the opportunity is too good to be passed over, and the group travels to Kill Creek and the house whose first owner and his lover were killed shortly before the Civil War, giving origin to the tales about the mansion being haunted.

At this point, one might expect the story to proceed over a well-traveled path, with the night bringing uncounted horrors and the people in the house not reaching the next morning alive; instead the Halloween at Finch House flows in a very mundane way, with the sole exception of the mediatic slaughter perpetrated by Wainwright on his guests, as he exploits their weaknesses without mercy to spice up the podcast he so meticulously planned.  Of course some strange occurrences manifest themselves during the night, but all of them can be attributed to the peculiar atmosphere of the house and the personal ghosts each person carries inside.  On the next morning, the group departs to scatter again toward their former lives, and that’s one of the novel’s best angles – the choice of letting them go unscathed, against all expectations. Because the true, chilling horror starts only after they leave the house behind them – or so they think….

Kill Creek is a powerful, well-crafted story that relies more on psychological horror rather than the graphic kind, even though the latter part of the novel does turn quite bloody and horrific (so be warned about that…): yet the explicit violence manages to feel less frightening than the kind visited on the soul of the victims.  A case in point is that of the character driven to kill others in a most shocking way, and yet constantly saying he’s sorry and asking for forgiveness even as he performs his bloody task, the torment of the acts he’s compelled to execute still managing to scar his mind and soul, both betrayed out of their basic gentleness by a force outside of his control.  And that force is exerted by a very peculiar entity, the house itself, that here possesses a definite personality that turns it into another character, one imbued with a profound evil that appears all the more frightening because of its lack of definite origin, not in spite of it.

No reason is given for the house’s profound need of belief in its haunted, creepy nature, yet this insatiable hunger and the way the house can sink its hooks into the victims’ minds and force them to do its bidding is a chilling, unexpected development.  The old mansion appears like a skilled manipulator, one that knows people’s most buried secrets and fears and uses them to maneuver the victims like puppets on strings: the four writers’ back-stories are beautifully interlaced with the narrative and transformed from old ghosts into present terrors that take on shape and substance, breaking the barrier between the real and the imagined, the merely feared and the concrete danger that can hurt, maim and kill.

The experience the characters undergo at the “hands” of the Kill Creek house is one that strips them of their outer defenses and forces them to confront their inner selves, and to change: one might say that they come out of it (those who do, that is…) as very different people – how different, only time will tell, because there is no real resolution to the story, as the last few paragraphs show with a quite unexpected revelation.  Even though, on hindsight, it should not have been so unexpected in consideration of the total lack of predictability that is the leitmotif of this novel.

Highly recommended.

 

My Rating: