Under paranormal circumstances
Spooky police thriller second in trilogy
TORONTO — Carsten Stroud is sipping coffee in the dignified surroundings of his Toronto publisher’s boardroom and musing about severed heads.
Well, actually he’s discussing the French Revolution and the guillotine and how that plays into one attention-grabbing sequence in his groundbreaking new police thriller, The Homecoming.
“During The Terror, a doctor wondered how long after the head was severed did any form of consciousness remain, and he actually did several studies of severed heads after the guillotine had dealt with them.” There’s a certain quiet relish in the way in which Stroud recounts this grisly historical anecdote.
One of the doctor’s experiments involved the use of a mirror — “which I thought was spectacularly sadistic” — which was held up to the detached head to see if there was any flickering indication of a mind still lingering.
You’re still pondering these images as Stroud, a writer with a magpie’s zest for collecting peculiar bits of data, shifts into a discussion of the role that the mirror plays in Irish, Creole and Jewish folklore, particularly the belief “that you have to cover a mirror because otherwise the spirit will travel to the mirror and stay there — in the mirror.”
Next he’s discussing the role of birds in Native American mythology because that influenced the opening pages for The Homecoming, published this week by Knopf. What happens is that, somewhere in the American South, a Learjet encounters a black smudge in the sky. Except that it isn’t a black smudge — it’s a flock of crows. The resulting collision decimates the birds and sends the aircraft spiralling fatally to earth.
So was this pure accident or something more sinister? In the world of Stroud’s new fictional trilogy, you never know for sure.
But bear in mind that The Homecoming is first and foremost a sizzling police procedural — product of a 67-year-old Canadian writer who has been a cop himself and who made the New York Times Best Sell- ers list with Close Pursuit, a lacerating behind-thescenes-look at the New York City police force. When Niceville, the first novel of the trilogy appeared a year ago, it was applauded for its gritty authenticity and won an enthusiastic endorsement from the revered Elmore Leonard. But Niceville was more than just a police procedural. Like this year’s successor, The Homecoming, it was genuinely spooky. That’s because Stroud had the audacity to throw a powerful element of the paranormal into the mix. Niceville began with the disappearance of 10-year-old Rainey Teague — alarmingly in full view of a security camera — and the latest in a chain of frightening abductions. It also introduced readers to a sinister place called Crater Sink. The locals used to whisper that “things go into Crater Sink but never come back” — a warning that hangs heavily over The Homecoming as well.
In the new novel, Rainey has, through a macabre set of events, been restored to the community and to the care of foster parents Nick Kavanaugh, a local cop who’s convinced that something’s not right about this kid, and wife Kate who’s far more trusting. And yes, there is a problem. It seems that Rainey has been spending a lot of time at Crater Sink and that something called ‘the Nothing” lives inside him and is hatching a diabolical scenario for Niceville, a Southern town which maybe isn’t as nice as it seems.
Stroud deftly meshes the supernatural with the normal crime-busting pursuits you would expect to find in a police thriller. He serves up a violent bank robbery, a harrowing car chase, the bloody mayhem which results when a deer crashes into a bus and some juicy examples of villainy. The latter include Nick’s brother-in-law, a wifebeating monstrosity named Byron Deitz, a pair of mur- derous rogue cops, and a courtly sadist named Mr. Endicott.
Stroud strives for authenticity when dealing with the nuts and bolts of police work. “You have to play fair. A police procedural has to make sense.”
But what makes the paranormal acceptable here? Well, it’s happening in a typical Southern town, a place susceptible to — in the words of an old Scottish prayer — ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night. “The South is pretty rich territory. When I was a kid, I set off on a motorcycle and hit all the Civil War battlegrounds. Something seems to survive in those places ... so much blood poured into the ground. If you stand in those places, there’s something there. I know I sound like a complete idiot, but I’m writing about it.”
But he’s avoids going overboard with the horror.
“If you’re going to have gibbering zombies rising out of the grave, you’re going to be in cartoon land,” he snorts. “The real kind of evil — it’s subtle.” He has no doubt about the reality of evil. “Like a miasmic sort of fever, it runs deeply in the background of a lot of civilizations, and in ours as well.”