Midwestern Gothic by Scott Thomas
We have horror fiction at home.
Midwestern Gothic is a quartet of horror novellas set in the home state of author Scott Thomas: Kansas. The cover image — a blood-streaked field of plowed hay — evokes a sense of unsettling malice in the American heartland, and the stories generally do a good job of living up to my expectations.
As with any collection of stories, however, some are better than others.
The Boy in the Woods is perhaps the most conventional of the four tales. It’s a spin on the familiar “summer camp slasher” subgenre — although in this story there’s a supernatural evil that infects a bunch of counselors at the camp, turning them into persistent killers that our young protagonist, Eddie, must evade.
There’s some nice depth and context concerning Eddie: he’s the last-remaining camper, because his parents’ flight was delayed, he’s also got a tragic backstory (he was mauled by a vicious dog as an infant), and he’s got some literary inspiration to help him match the moment that life has thrust upon him: a Goosebumps-style tale of a boy who summons the courage to confront a monster.
It’s an entertaining if not entirely compelling yarn, but it’s short, sweet, and keeps things moving at a decent clip.
It’s certainly not the lesser of the tetralogy; that dubious honor goes to the book’s opener, The Door in the Field. With that title (and the accompanying interior “cover art”), you might well expect a disturbingly creepy tale about someone going through a door inexplicably standing in the middle of nowhere… and who knows what happens next? The imagination runs wild! The possibilities are endless!
Unfortunately, that’s not at all what the story is about.
Rather, it’s the story of a construction worker with an awful temper who finds himself at the mercy of an aging serial killer… who wants to pass on his torch to someone in whom he sees a kindred spirit.
It’s a violent, twisty tale of survival, but it falls far short of expectations provoked by its title, which actually comes from the story’s bookends and refer to an apocryphal novel titled “The Door in the Field.”
And as you’ve probably noticed, there’s a pattern here… Each of these short stories involves a fictitious piece of literature. (I didn’t realize until reading the afterword, but each of the four stories in Midwestern Gothic refers to one of the four author characters of Thomas’ debut novel, Kill Creek, which I have not read.) Thematically, it’s a nice touch. These are horror stories, inspired by non-existent horror stories. Cursed art begets cursed art.
“Art” in the broader sense in the case of the collection’s closer, One Half of a Child’s Face. For although there is a fictitious book within this story (a non-fiction assemblage of essays on the horror genre which the protagonist is copyediting for her job), this is a story about an evil painting.
Sienna is divorced. Her ex-husband lives in an apartment building that Sienna can see from her backyard. In fact, she’s close enough to see into several windows, and she begins spying on the inhabitants and imagining their personalities and lives.
It’s only because she’s such a voyeur that she notices the strange things that are happening within the building…
A strange painting is hung in an apartment where she’s never noticed anyone living, although the lights are always on and the curtains are always open. Soon after the painting appears, the adults in the building start acting weird. Even more oddly, the children of the apartments are all drawn to the painting in the empty apartment — as if they’re hypnotized by it… And since this is her ex-husband’s weekend to have their daughter, Maya, she too is drawn to the artwork and most likely in danger.
One Half of a Child’s Face is a neat page-turner of a story. The author does a good job of putting us inside Sienna’s head and spinning a realistic scenario where she’s certain about the impossible things she’s witnessed, yet nobody will believe her…
Crucially, there is no unnecessary explanation for the evil painting — it exists, it must be defeated, and that’s enough.
But the very best novella of the bunch is, by far, Wear Your Secret Like a Stone. It’s also the one where the imagined book is most relevant to the tale being told.
Tara works in a store and is asked by the manager to contribute a book recommendation to their Halloween display. Granted the book she selects is incredibly dark, but a peculiar customer complaint strikes Tara as extremely suspicious — especially when she learns that the town where she lives mirrors the setting of the novel in question.
In the book, a stone marker is found in a dried-out riverbed. It has markings on it, but no-one has a clue what they mean. Too late, they realize that it’s a warning. For after the townsfolk extricate it from the river, a portal into Hell itself is opened up, and the men of the town become possessed and extremely violent.
As it happens, the real-life town where Tara lives has a similar stone that was discovered decades earlier. Surely there’s some connection between fiction and reality that someone wants to keep quiet? Undeterred by the potential horrors that might lie ahead, Tara determines to track down the mysterious customer who made the complaint and find out what’s really going on.
Wear Your Secret Like a Stone was apparently originally intended to be the shortest of the stories in the book, but it ended up being the longest. It deserves the pages it commands. Indeed, it has full-blown novel potential written all over it (with a little more thought, a little more depth). But as it is, it’s an engrossing and unsettling read, and most definitely the highlight of the set.
Midwestern Gothic is a welcome artifact of contemporary horror fiction. Like Goosebumps or The Twilight Zone before it, it invites us to see the world around us a little bit differently, to think that unseen horrors might actually lurk all about. Its flavor of horror — ominous gothic — feels particularly fresh in the current horror landscape. It’s just a shame that the works feel a little slight at times, as it feels there’s potential here to let the stories breath and grow and become more significant.