Charles Grant is one of a handful of writers for whom I own 50 plus books. This is one of his earlier books but one of the more recent additions to my shelves.
It's an Oxrun Station novel. Oxrun Station is the Charlie Grant version of King's Castle Rock or Derry, a small town in the USA where weird things happen. (I just checked the dates and castle Rock does predate Oxrun so i do have it the right way around)
Personally, I think I'd prefer to live in Castle Rock because it's not as creepy. Pennywise would probably be too scared to live there to be honest.
You can normally depend on Grant to build a weird and dreamlike atmosphere where reality is debatable. This book is no exception.
Josh Miller is an investigator in Oxrun Station. he specialises in finding weird and rare objects for people (this was before the days of Google and EBay). While he's out searching for his latest assigned item, he finds the police at the site of a nasty car crash. One of the occupants of the car has vanished, leaving his arm behind, but not even a trail of blood.
This is the first in a sequence of events that lead Josh to realise he's being followed by something not quite natural.
As per normal for Grant, he takes his time building up the atmosphere. Every chapter ends on a minor cliffhanger (sometimes quite a major one), so I did a lot of finishing reading mid-page in this book, at a point where I didn't feel I needed to keep going.
Some aspects of this book do feel a bit dated. Josh is very sexist as a boss by today's standards. But this book wasn't written now so it's a much better reflection of the time it was written than any bowlderised vision of it would be. I do feel it's important to look at when a book was written before you criticise, and, by the standards of the time, Josh is a nice guy.
There are a number of other disappearances before the end of the book, and a lot of weirdness that josh has to face.
I loved that the supernatural is the last thing to occur to him as an explanation for the increasing weirdness. it grounded the character in reality much more.
The final chapters in this book contain some of the most concentrated horror I've read from Grant. Almost from when we discover the reason for the book's title up until the conclusion, the pace never lets up. Josh's reality is fracturing, and we have no idea if he's going to actually survive to the end of the book.
The sense of his disintegrating mental state is palpable. His fear radiates from the page.
I will admit that I figured out what was going on fairly early, but that increased the tension in the final sequence because I knew what he was walking into even if he didn't.
If you can track down a copy of this, do it. The prose is dripping in atmosphere. There's a constant sense of unease that's almost unmatched in modern horror fiction. Whilst his plotting wasn't always the strongest, at his best he was one of the scariest writers out there. Considering the lack of overt violence in any of his books, that's a hell of an achievement.
This book is a great example of what he was capable of. the set pieces are genuinely scary and the final act is up there with the best he's written.
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