Michael Gibson has returned to the quiet Appalachian home of his forebears to take care of his grandmother. Sadie is old and sickly but she has an important story to tell about growing up poor and Melungeon (a mixed race group of mysterious origin) while bedeviled by a snake-handling uncle and empathic powers she but barely understands.
In a field not far from the family home, however, lies an iron-bound crate within a small shack buried four feet deep under Kudzu vine. Michael somehow understands that hidden inside that crate is potentially his own death, his grandmother's death, and perhaps the deaths of everyone in the valley if he does not come to understand Sadie's story well enough.
***
Folks are rarely as forthright in
life as they are in literature.
Communicating the truth of the
human condition would make for some messy stories, so even the most deftly
developed characters are at best partial pictures of the people they’d really be.
After all, we wear different faces each day, don’t we? We wear one at work,
another at home; one in the company of our mothers, another alongside our lovers.
During your life you play many parts—a
daughter, a mother, a grandmother, a hero, a villain. You enter people’s lives
and then you exit them. You say your lines—you inspire some people, and maybe
some people hate you. And then, well, you leave the stage. (p.233)
Whether you receive a round of
applause when you do, or boos, is up to you.
Blood Kin by Steve Rasnic Tem is a book about the conflicting legacies
we leave which deals with death and depression and disability whilst trading in
tension and frequently intolerable terror to excellent effect.
Our man Michael is almost a
monster at the offing. On the back of a bad breakup he’s come back to the house
in the South where he was born and raised; ostensibly to look after his ailing
grandparent, but in truth he’s considering killing her—or at least letting her
die. He decides against it, eventually, before settling in to suffer through
some more of old Sadie’s story.
See, for some reason she’s
determined to tell him about her hardships in this here hollow. About the
preacher whose hellish services she was pressganged into attending as a girl,
and the ungodly horrors that followed:
They’d had the most gruesome murder
anybody had ever heard of and the murderer in the local jail and the deputy
scared to death of angry folks taking his prisoner and her daddy almost shot
the most popular moonshiner in the county and there were two big families now
that didn’t know how to talk to each other and of course there was the preacher
going a little crazier each day. Who walked around with a snake under his shirt
curled around his chest and belly. (p.217)
The bulk of Blood Kin is composed of Sadie’s twisted tale, and though it’s slow
to start, Michael’s chapters inspire a sort of morbid curiosity that sees us
past the central narrative’s flat first act. He’s unpleasant, yes—abhorrent
even—but also sympathetic to a certain extent, especially once we understand
that there’s something different about him... something that makes listening to
Sadie’s story more than a mere chore.
He doesn’t just hear about her
experiences, readers. He sees them. Feels
them in his very bones to boot—as indeed do we:
He didn’t understand what was happening
to him. When she talked about her first period he’d felt a dampness, a rawness
between his legs, and a stiffness in his lower gut. When her father, Michael’s
great grandfather, bit into the mouse, he’d tasted what she tasted and what her
father had tasted: the sharp salt of blood and the dryness of hair fiber and
the crunch and grit of bone stuff. There was danger in those stories, and it
was beginning to touch him as well.” (p.71)
Michael certainly has his part to
play in the overarching narrative, however he recedes when the fiery preacher
appears in the story at Blood Kin’s
core: a story which takes in racial hatred, religious bigotry and the plight of
the impoverished as well as exploring the questions of personality and
inheritance discussed above.
It’s as well, in the end, that
our time with Michael comes to a momentary close, because this is the moment
Tem’s text really ramps up. A sense of tension arises in tandem with the
snake-charmer’s arrival, a creeping feeling which builds and builds towards an
act of such unspeakable evil that it hits us, ultimately, like a punch in the
gut. More of a focus on the framing tale’s narrator would only have served to
undermine this terrible momentum.
With one story taking the strain
whenever the other encounters an obstacle, this two-headed snake of a tale is superbly
structured and gracefully paced, whilst the plot proves almost unstoppable. If Justified followed the fortunes of a
little girl and a perverted preacher rather than Raylan Givens and his brother
from another mother... if it turned on real human horror rather than revolvers at
dawn... well. Said show might not make for the closest of touchstones, no, but
it and Blood Kin share a gen-you-wine
Southern fried flavour, not to mention a knack with characters and narrative, both
of which Tem imbues with depth and tremendous texture.
It's a bloody good book, to be sure, but be warned: Blood Kin is brutal and gruesome too.
***
Blood Kin
by Steve Rasnic Tem
UK Publication: March 2014, Solaris
US Publication: February 2014, Solaris
Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
The Book Depository
Recommended and Related Reading
No comments:
Post a Comment