Tag Archives: Scott Carson

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Chill,’ by Scott Carson

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The day was dull and gray but the leaves were a brilliant assortment of orange, yellow, and red. A long, lovely summer with its throat cut.

Long ago, the town of Galesburg, in the Catskill Mountains of New York state, was taken by eminent domain and drowned under what became the Chilewaukee Reservoir (popularly known as “The Chill”). The purpose was to provide backup water for the City of New York. The residents, fiercely superstitious folk, had warned the planners and engineers that the land there was dangerous, and they had sealed their warnings with violence and fire. But the dam was built and has stood ever since.

Gillian Mathers is a descendant of the Galesburg folk. She was raised by her grandmother near the reservoir, but her father fetched her to the city after the grandmother’s disappearance. Somehow Gillian felt compelled to come back, though, and now she’s on the water authority police force, guarding the man-made lake where her ancestors are buried.

Aaron Ellsworth is the son of the county sheriff. He once set his heart on being on a Coast Guard rescue crew, but he washed out in training. Now he’s a ne’er-do-well, shiftless, on the road to criminal life. Until the day he accidentally kills a man at the dam, but then the same man reappears out of the water, apparently uninjured.

Old prophecies are beginning to come true. Unseen, unknown forces are at work under the earth. And Gillian is feeling the pull of her grandmother’s earliest lessons – of the old faith of Galesburg, and the sacrifices it demands. Meanwhile, the rain falls, threatening to overwhelm the old dam, and the people downstream have no idea what danger they’re in.

Like all Scott Carson novels, The Chill is very well written. I thought of Dean Koontz as I read, though I guess the style and subject matter are closer to Stephen King. I don’t like horror as a genre generally, though I do like Koontz, and The Chill seems to bear some of Koontz’s essential optimism. There are even faint echoes of Christianity: “Sacrifice is about salvation, Mrs. Baerga had said. Not vengeance. Whoever told you that story used the wrong word. Lots of people would die for family, honey. But how many would die for a stranger?”

I enjoyed The Chill. Not as much as I liked Carson’s Lost Man’s Lane, but it’s quite good of its kind.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Where They Wait,’ by Scott Carson

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The signature sound of the loon is a solitary sound. It’s a haunting cry of undeniable beauty with an undercurrent of sorrow. An announcement of peaceful northern isolation, the Thoreau of birds.

The sound is a lie, though. Loons are not solitary, nor are they peaceful. The loon’s life is a violent one. The birds will stab each other with their beaks, beat each other with their wings, and pull each other under the water. The midnight cry that makes people think of Thoreau at Walden Pond is anything but serene.

I picked up another novel by Scott Carson, whose Lost Man’s Lane impressed me so. Where They Wait did not bowl me over to quite the same degree, but it’s very good.

Nick Bishop is a journalist, out of work, yet another victim of the digital revolution. Living in Florida, he calls an old college friend in Maine, where he used to live and went to school. The friend tells him he’s editing the college’s alumni magazine, and offers him a decent fee to write an article about a distinguished alumnus, a young computer tycoon who lives locally. But Nick needs to come up and interview him in person, he says.

Well, it’s been a long time since Nick has gone home to Maine. His mother is there, but she’s in nursing care, her memory lost to a stroke. Ironically, she’d been a highly respected expert on memory. There’s also the family’s lakeside “camp,” what people in other states would call a cabin, on a lake. Nick drives up and interviews the young tycoon, surprised to be met at the door by a young woman who’d been a childhood friend, and on whom he’d had a crush. The tycoon shows Nick a new cell phone app he’s working on – a relaxation program. Nick tries the beta version, and it works well. Rather too well. His life will never be the same, and soon he’ll learn facts about his past he’d never guessed. Facts that could be the death of him and others.

Where They Wait is an earlier novel than Lost Man’s Lane, and (in my opinion) not quite as successful. However, I considered Lost Man’s Lane almost perfect, so plenty of room remains for this to be quite a good novel. And such judgments are subjective anyway. Where They Wait offers intriguing characters and a compelling mystery, with one foot in science and the other in the supernatural. Very much in my own line, when I’m writing such books as Wolf Time.

I enjoyed Where They Wait, and read it in a day. There are a couple respectful, vague references to Christianity, and the whole thing could be viewed allegorically, if one were in the mood.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Lost Man’s Lane,’ by Scott Carson

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“Sure,” Noah said. “But to be any good, it takes time and it’s humbling. Anything worth doing in life meets that criteria. Detective work has one essential requirement: a willingness to admit that you might be wrong. Being observant and quick on your feet is nice, but self-doubt is mandatory.”

What an exceedingly fine book this was.

I didn’t actually realize what I was buying when I got Scott Carson’s Lost Man’s Lane on a discount offer. I assumed I was getting an ordinary, mundane missing person mystery. But this book is more like my Epsom novels – two parts urban fantasy and one part horror. Just enough horror to spice the mixture, but not enough to put off a wuss like this reader.

The story takes place in Bloomington, Indiana in the late 1990s. Marshal Miller is a teenager, the son of a single mother. The very day he gets his learner’s permit to drive, he’s pulled over by a policeman, a hostile man who speaks threateningly to him and writes him a ticket. Through his rear view mirror, Marshall sees a young woman in the back seat of the cruiser, wearing a tee-shirt from a local ice cream shop and crying.

No court summons arrives, so Marshall turns his attention to other things – until someone shows him a missing person’s flyer being posted around town. It shows a picture of the very young woman Marshall saw in the police car. He contacts the private investigator whose contact information is on the flyer, a genial local man who passes the information on to the police and takes him under his wing as an apprentice P.I.

Marshall is suddenly a local celebrity – but that turns sour when he makes another police report that appears to be false. Now Marshall is a laughingstock, accused of inventing hoaxes, bringing false hope to the missing girls’ family

It’s a hard time for Marshall, but he weathers the storm with the help of his mother, the girl he loves (who is unfortunately dating somebody else), the private investigator, and a couple good friends. He will be tempered in fire as he comes of age at the turn of the millennium.

Scott Carson (actually bestselling author Michael Koryta) is simply a top-notch fictioneer. If you asked me to find a flaw in Lost Man’s Lane, I couldn’t think of one. The characters are vivid and faceted. The dialogue is fast and crisp. The prose sings. And the plotting – the plot is an intricate web of threads, all of which tie up elegantly at the end. Reading this book was a delight from beginning to end.

The supernatural elements in Lost Man’s Lane bear no marks of Christian theology. The approach seems to be similar to that of Manly Wade Wellman (whose Silver John stories are referenced at one point). The book’s sexual morality doesn’t follow Christian ethics, so don’t look for that sort of story.

But overall I find no fault in Lost Man’s Lane. Wish I’d written it.