If you’re in a William W. Johnstone book, don’t pet the kitties and don’t play with the toys. Credit 88
In The Nursery (1985), a small town in Louisiana has been taken over by the “Prince of Foulness, Lord of Darkness,” and his friend “the Master on Earth of All Things Dark and Ugly and Evil and Profane.” The cops have been bought off by Satan and are given to ending conversations with statements like, “I’d lick her ass just to see the little puckered hole. Bye, now.” Satanic covens spread their message via heavy-metal music that teaches “self-mutilation, assault, suicide, drugs, murder, sex; anti-establishment and anti-social rebellion against parents, society, education, and law and order.” Sometimes a firm spanking is enough to drive the Devil out of a teenager, but usually they have to be shot in the face. Dogs are good and often form armies to assist humans fighting Satan, whereas cats can go either way.
Toy Cemetery (1987) achieves maximum Johnstone. Vietnam vet Jay Clute returns to Victory, Missouri, where he grew up, with nine-year-old daughter Kelly in tow. Within hours of his arrival, Jay discovers that the two major local landmarks are (1) an enormous doll factory in the center of town run by an obese pedophile named Bruno Dixon, who films satanic kiddie porn in it, and (2) a high-security hospital/mental institution/underground research facility that houses the “products of incest,” enormous man-monsters with apple-sized heads and superhuman strength. Tiny toys run amok, as does incest. Jay and his daughter almost hook up their first night, only to snap out of it when the crosses they’re wearing clink together.
Reading this book is like driving through a dust storm while in a post-concussion haze: the harder you try to focus, the more everything slips away into an insanity vortex. A supermarket check-out girl’s head explodes, but no one seems to mind. Possessed teenage boys follow Kelly through town, waggling their inappropriate boners until she fights them with karate and kills one with an ax. Everyone has a secret doll collection. A tiny French general leads a toy army.
Johnstone piles incident on incident, trope on trope, and if something isn’t working he keeps on piling. When time itself needs to be brought to a screeching halt, Jay Clute just pulls out his gun and shoots a clock. Because clocks make time, right? In William W. Johnstone’s world, why not?
Location, Location, Location
In 1964 the police shooting of a young black man kicked off the Harlem riots in New York City. In 1965 a dispute between a police officer and a young black man pulled over for drunk driving kicked off the Watts riots in Los Angeles. Those two incidents in turn kicked off white flight: middle- and upper-class white families fleeing the cities for the countryside, embracing a back-to-the-land lifestyle, buying farmhouses, and turning homey hamlets into planned communities.
Between 1970 and 1980, one million white people left New York City, and in the first four years of the ’70s, six million Americans ditched the cities for the country. It was the first decade in 150 years that the rural population grew faster than the urban population. The horror novels from this time reveal that what was waiting for these homeowners was far worse than what they had fled. In a stroke of poor planning, apparently the majority of America’s rural communities had been built on cursed land. Whether it’s the site of an ancient murder (The Owlsfane Horror, 1981), a witch hanging (Maynard’s House, 1980), or a Native American massacre (The Curse, 1989), America feels like a massive graveyard stretching from sea to shining sea.
Add in parts of the country rendered unfit for human habitation by invisible aliens who return every few hundred years to kill people with spontaneous orgasms that melt their brains (The Searing, 1980), sinister cults occupying abandoned mental hospitals (The Turning, 1978), or isolated beachheads where Satan is growing killer humanoids in church basements (Effigies, 1980), and you might as well stay in the city and get murdered by the sewer alligators. (Keep reading.)
In a country dotted with mass-killing sites and derelict insane asylums, the sorts of small-town traumas one could encounter are limitless. In The Stepford Wives (1972), Ira Levin mocks the petrified patriarchy who fled the civil rights movement and feminism by retreating to elite Connecticut enclaves where they murder their unhappy wives and replace them with compliant fembots.
Depending on whom you asked, The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin (Rosemary’s Baby) satirized either feminism or its backlash. Credit 89
Not content to rest on the laurels of The Other, Thomas Tryon wrote another classic, Harvest Home (1973), all about the dangers of romanticizing small-town life. Tryon had watched his colleagues abandon the city for the country, lecturing those they left behind about the clean air and good values of their new neighbors. The ex-urbanites buy failing farms at rock-bottom prices and then fetishize what they’ve destroyed, scooping up farm tools at bankruptcy sales and nailing them to the walls of their brand-new kitchens. Tryon wondered if their new neighbors might not share the same values as these newcomers, if perhaps they were aligned with stronger, older, bloodier forces that the city folk had forgotten. So when his urban refugees land in the quaint village of Cornwall Coombe, they’re totally unprepared for the bloody fertility rites the tiny town requires to ensure a good harvest.
Credit 91
Wherever you go, there Satan is, be it Missouri (The Curse), upstate New York (Effigies, The Turning), or the D.C. suburbs (The Searing). Credit 90
Tryon, and the writers who followed in his footsteps, suggested that urban refugees patronized the flyover states at their peril. Joan Samson’s The Auctioneer is a hard and flinty book about a small farming community decimated by the city dwellers who move in and start buying up all the wagon wheels and handmade quilts, then the town’s small children, and finally its soul. Maynard’s House is a snowy Maine ghost story about a Vietnam vet who moves to the countryside to heal his traumatized soul, only to find that the quiet country nights are more hellish than any tour of ’Nam, thanks to the spirit of a witch hanged there centuries before. Or maybe it’s the PTSD that’s loosening his grip on reality. Or maybe it doesn’t matter because whatever the cause, the effect is the same: moving to the country is the worst decision he ever made.
Digging in Deeper
Jere Cunningham sums up small-town trauma in The Abyss (1984), his apocalyptic novel set in Tennessee coal country. The town of Bethel has shrunk to a dying cluster of cheap bars and trailer parks since all the old mines closed. But now investors are bringing in deep-drilling equipment to reopen an old shaft. Suddenly there are jobs, people are moving back, and the dream of manufacturing’s return is alive again. A few ominous signs appear, but if you’re loyal to Bethel, if you’re the kind of person who belongs there, if you believe in America, then you’re not about to question a good thing.