REVIEW: Shadows Over New England

Shadows Over New England
By David Goudsward & Scott T. Goudsward, Foreword by Christopher Golden

The announcement of this book’s publication was a dream come true for your humble narrator. Finally, here is a hefty tome addressing a significant element of what drives my fascination with Maine and my need to create the Strange Maine Gazette and blog in the first place!

Within the pages of Shadows Over New England are places both real and fictitious which have been written into weird tales and horror movies over the last three centuries and more, with a few burial places of choice personalities sprinkled here and there for good measure. They are listed state after state, town after town, street after street, so that if you happen to be going to, say, Portland, and you want to take a little tour of places you fondly remember from reading the stories of Rick Hautala or Stephen King – look no further, this book will suggest a path for you (if you dare let it).

So, dear readers, on the one hand, this is a descriptive book of lists – placenames, haunted corners of the New England landscape, and so on. On the other hand, it is so much more. As Christopher Golden mentions in his foreword, “New England has always cast long shadows of inspiration over the hearts and imaginations of storytellers.” This phenomena is something that fascinates me. WHY, for heaven’s sake, am I so enamored of Maine? Why does New England breed such a peculiar taste in its literati for things that creep and spook and lay curses left and right across the blasted earth? Why is it so hard to pin down exactly what creates the creative juices that make us tick at such a different rhythm?

These are large questions, looming and wringing their hands, looking for answers that cannot be given unless by that quirk of autumn air that tickles your nose for the first time each year, or by the insistent rustling of leaves that strikes your ear in just such a way that you must turn to see who (or what) is following you, or by the way that the bare branches grab your eye as their silhouettes sway against the twilight sky. The answers lie under the mossy flagstones we find before an abandoned cellar hole, twisted in weeds and smelling of old earth. The solution is to give oneself up to the air, to the land, to the tales we spin about them, as writers have done throughout the history of New England.

Enter the brothers Goudsward and their marvelous book! What better way to wander through the real back roads of make-believe Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Vermont? What better way to find out about a story you have yet to read, than to stumble across it fortuitously in this book, your finger falling onto the page as the book opens randomly, pinpointing your next destination? Or perhaps you are the type who really relishes a book of lists and the tidy thrill of checking items off, one by one. Either way, as a wanderer or an orderly traveler with itinerary in hand, this book is a terrific guide for the lover of weird fiction and New England’s own uncanny heritage. Both fictitious destinations and the real world inspirations for them are listed, which should please history buffs such as myself to no end.

The seventy-plus page chapter on Maine is by no means as exhaustive as it could be, which is probably a good thing – it would make a big fat book all by itself. The Goudswards have laid a feasting table out for us, crafted carefully to tantalize us into further exploration. The Stephen King end of the table is understandably impressive, a buffet in its own right. The Rick Hautala selections lead us on a merry chase (and gave me a list of stories and books to look for as I start to investigate his version of Maine).

Other tales that make up the crème de la crème of Maine weird fiction and film are here as well. For example, the first entry for our fair state is Altonville, where the eerie 1934 book The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck is set (a volume which I highly recommend). What transpires on the campus of the fictitious Maine State College of Surgery must be read to be believed. The ubiquitous seaside Collinsport, of television’s Dark Shadows fame, rears its head stylishly, as well as Schooner Bay, scene of the classic 1947 film The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. The list goes on and on, filled with names familiar and not so familiar. Even hardcore Maineacs such as myself will find plenty of unplundered material here.

Since Shadows Over New England emerged from its den in spring 2008 it has garnered substantial attention. It was nominated for a prestigious Stoker Award in the category of Superior Achievement in Nonfiction, and is on the short list for the upcoming Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards in the category of Best Book.

Voting for the Rondo Awards is open to the public, and can be done by visiting http://www.Rondoaward.com to participate. Online voting will continue through Saturday, March 22, 2009, with winners being announced Sunday evening, March 23. Voting is done via email, and you can vote for as many categories as you have opinions in.

To purchase this excellent book should be quite easy, provided they haven't sold out the first edition, as it is available from the publisher BearManorMedia.com, or through Amazon.com, Powells Books, Barnes & Noble and other fine bookstores near you!

Review: Dirt by Mark LaFlamme

Mark LaFlamme’s Dirt: An American Campaign

SPECIAL NOTE! Catch Mark LaFlamme in a rare Portland appearance at the noontime Brown Bag Lunch lecture series at the Portland Public Library, 5 Monument Square, Portland, Maine, on Wednesday, November 12th.

Graveyards, resurrected love, backroads intrigue – these ingredients cause no great stretch of the imagination for a confessed fan of fellow Mainer, Stephen King, and his predecessors, including Edgar Allan Poe.

Like King, LaFlamme is a tricky writer. He lures you in by seeming ordinary, but there is something residing in his texts, in his characters’ dialogues and inner monologues, that goes beyond that threshold of normalcy and expectations. Before I know it, he’s got me again. This is not an unhappy thing. The pages have to be turned, but this is a pleasure, as the story plays out before me – he’s done all the work. I cannot turn away until finally I reach the end.

This was true of the first LaFlamme book I read, The Pink Room, and remains true of his latest, Dirt. What makes this guy from Lewiston such a crafter of thought-provoking page-turners? I can only guess that it’s this – he is not afraid of hard work. This is a man who spends day and night pounding the crime beat for the Lewiston Sun Journal. Off the news desk, he writes books and short stories, which the rest of us get to read. He is not going to waste our time.

The greater world hasn’t picked up on him yet. He’s still mostly ours at this point, here in the state of Maine. This doesn’t stop him from weaving more widely traveled threads into his work.

In Dirt, LaFlamme focuses through the lens of the all-too-familiar worldview of the American Presidential campaign. Don’t look for the all-American glamour that comes from power in this story. It’s buried under dirt.

Maine Governor Frank F. Cotton is raging up through the ranks as a distinguished contender for the Republican nomination. His image is that of hardy Maine stock, hard-working, honest, stern but engaging. The press knows his son Calvin as a recent widower and a staunch white-collar environmentalist, a lawyer who pushes back against the big boys his father pals around with. What the press doesn’t know, and what Frank Cotton doesn’t want them to find out, is that his grieving son is also unable to wrap his mind around the death of his wife, Bethany.

While Frank Cotton has been running his campaign state to state across the country, Calvin Cotton has very quietly lost his mind, and fetched his lovely bride from her funereal box for one last lovely New England winter getaway.

It is Thomas Cashman’s job to fetch them both back, as privately as possible. He can’t think of anyone better to help than Billy Baylor. In his role as best-selling novelist, Baylor explored the theme of love after death thoroughly and repeatedly, until his career was interrupted by the death of his wife and young daughter in a random accident. Since then, Baylor hasn’t had much of a thought about anything but misery and beer.

Governor Cotton calls Cashman. Cashman finds Baylor. Together they track Calvin and Bethany, with the hounds of the press at their heels.

If you open one box of worms, you often find another. And another. And another. And boy do those worms like dirt.

I won’t ruin it for you – read it yourself.

Hell House in Maine revisited

While most folks know that Stephen King's books focus predominantly on the state of Maine, few know that some of the classics of the horror genre are set in our home state as well. Maine Crime Writer blog, run by Patrick Shawn Bagley, takes a moment to focus on one of these: Hell House by Richard Matheson, author of other horror books such as I Am Legend, basis of the Vincent Price classic "Last Man on Earth." Hell House was later made into a terrifically chilling motion picture starring Roddy McDowall, "The Legend of Hell House." Since Matheson did the screenplay himself, it mirrors the book almost exactly.

Bagley sets the scene by stating, "I can’t think of a better way to kick off the Halloween season than by visiting Richard Matheson’s Hell House. The Belasco House in Caribou Falls, Maine is the 'Mt. Everest of haunted houses.'"

Read the rest of his post about this fictitious Maine haunt here.