<< Back 7/17/02 A solid beginning leads to an illogical, contrived end By Jeff Minick Quietus by Vivian Schilling. Truman Press, Inc., 2002. $24.95 — 596 pp. After reading Vivian Schilling’s Quietus, I feel that it is finally time to put my left hand over my heart, hold up my right hand, and take an oath stating that I will abstain for one year from the reading of anything vaguely resembling, but not nearly equaling in quality, the horror novels of Stephan King or Dean Koontz. No matter how catchy the cover or the title of the book, no matter who endorses the book or how interesting it looks after a brief scansion, I need to remember that somewhere in this type of book the author will pull a fast one, cheating readers by not remaining loyal to the original premises, however wild or fantastic, of her own story. For the first 100 hundred pages of Quietus, Schilling doesn’t cheat on her readers. Five people survive the crash of a chartered flight in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Kylie O’Rourke, her husband Jack, and their friends Amelia and Dix are four of the five survivors. After recovering physically from the crash, Kylie retains strong memories of that night, of walking about on the mountain outside the aircraft, of speaking with one of the victims who did die. As she mends and returns to her life as an interior designer, Kylie also has a sense of being pursued, followed through the streets of Boston by a ghostly specter who begins to take on shape as a man who was executed for murder in Kylie’s childhood. As her impressions grow stronger that she is indeed being followed, and that Jack and Amelia may also be in some sort of danger, the story takes on a gripping and frightening immediacy that will cause most readers to glance back over their shoulders once in a while if they are alone sitting in a shadowy room. So much for the first 100 pages. The next 500 pages of this bloated beast of a book will lead any thinking reader to want to dropkick it across the room (My own copy was a library book, so dropkicking was out of the question). In these 500 pages we learn that Kylie’s specter is the man from her childhood, a murderer now doomed to walk the earth, whose task is to see that people who should have died but who have somehow escaped death are safely killed and buried. With the exception of Dix, who wasn’t supposed to die, the others are also in the same danger as Kylie of being pursued by “dark angels.” To say more about the plot would spoil it for those who may wish to explore this messy book themselves, but as they read such adventurers might ask themselves many questions. Why, for example, do these dark angels take so long to reclaim their victims? These angels can walk through walls, instigate terrible accidents, and commit murder, so why all the delay? Why the muddled commentary about Kylie’s own stalker? With all the babbling about death and spirits in this book, why couldn’t the author tell us where this stalker lived in eternity or where he is going? Does his own weird ending mean that he is going to hell or simply to oblivion? Why does such a fat book about death seem to have so little that is real about death? Several victims die horribly and painfully —one is burnt alive, in fact, while his wife watches, staring into his eyes — yet Kylie’s carrier of death reassures her that the man’s soul felt no pain, only his body. Moreover, Schilling tells us that one of the main characters was executed in Massachusetts in 1974. Even I knew that this date had to be incorrect, looked it up on the Internet, and found that the last execution in Massachusetts had occurred in1947. At the end of the book Schilling tells us, without any explanation, that this was indeed the case. She also makes the infamous Charles Street Jail a place of execution, which it never was, and places it next to Massachusetts General Hospital when in fact it stood across the river in Charlestown. Schilling again gives us this misinformation at the end of the book, but why create such nonsense in the first place? It was unnecessary to the plot — the executed murderer could have as easily been shot by police — and it cast suspicion on the rest of the book. To play fair, Schilling might have at least placed this information in the beginning of her novel rather than at the end. Finally, the bizarre theology of Quietus, if we may call such a construct theology, is baffling. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, God created both human beings and angels. Angels are creatures without bodies, endowed by God with their own special powers. Human beings have their own powers as well, but do not become angels. Schilling seems to be creating her novel from this background, but then twists the theology to suit her plot, creating a hopeless bog of ideas that turns the terror of the reader first to puzzlement and finally to derisive laughter. Long ago there was a Twilight Zone episode on television in which an old woman locks death outside her door. Finally Death conceals himself as a young man — a part played by Robert Redford, in what must have been one of his first roles — brings a delivery to the old woman’s door, and after managing to make his way into her house, convinces the woman that it is her time to die. We listen and learn from such a story because it remains true to its own postulates. Quietus, and so many other novels of its genre, does not remain true to itself. The author “cheats,” and so the book becomes illogical and irritating for the reader. My left hand is over my heart. My right hand is up. I am taking the oath. (Jeff Minick can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com)