Back when I first started seriously reading horror, there was a popular formula in the genre. You had your upper middle class family moving from an urban city to a rural area. Often this was following some sort of trauma. A miscarriage was common. Perhaps the death of a child. Or maybe some sort of substance abuse. Sometimes it was a broken family. A father and his son; or maybe a mother and her children who had fled from a violent father-figure. The adult protagonist might have been a schoolteacher, or even a writer. A new start, a new place to call home. Away from the perils of city living.

But wait! There was something wrong with the children in the new town. Or maybe bodies were showing up drained of blood. Then there were those awful Indian Burial Grounds. LOTS of Indian Burial Grounds.

You can pretty much fill in the blanks from there. There is a menace in the small town. If the newcomer happens to be single, there will almost certainly be a romantic interest introduced into the story. The evidence piles up, and first comes denial. Then grudging, horrified acceptance. Stir and mix, and the supernatural danger is eradicated. Usually.

I liked that sort of thing, but I was also very glad to see the tide change with the coming of the Splatterpunks. The Light at the End, by Skipp and Spector may not have been the first hip, edgy horror novel, but it was a powerful catalyst, and many more were to follow.

After that we got the plethora of vampires. Serial killers. The nihilistic 90's brought on transgressive horror. We got Bizarro, read-till-you-puke grossout fiction, and of course the endless zombie apocalypse that descended upon the genre.

Most of that stuff got old to me pretty quickly. Transgressive horror became boring. Bizarro quickly seemed silly to me. I still like a good vampire tale, despite the ridiculous lengths writers went to make them new and interesting. Zombies, ah, I don't get it.

I feel like I've been all the way around the block, and I'm ready to enjoy traditional horror again. I never really got away from it, but in the last year or so I am making a point to either re-read, or dig up, old horror fiction paperbacks from the 80's that I had never read.

Alan Rodgers recently died, and I was deeply saddened by the loss. I hate to admit it, but while I have read some of his short stories, I had never previously read a full-length novel from Rodgers. I was a big fan of his editing. Especially in the badly-missed Night Cry Magazine.

So I clicked up old reliable Abebooks and ordered myself a copy of the Bantam paperback edition of Blood of the Children. By none other than the late Alan Rodgers. Original publication date: 1989.

Blood of the Children fits the bill I described above to a tee. You've got your teacher father fleeing a bad situation with the mother of his son. You have your basic small town that appears to be idyllic. Murderous kids? Check. Ancient evil? Check. Father and son attempting to make a new life in a small town? Triple check. Familiar ground.

Or so I thought.

Blood of the Children certainly starts off riddled with cliches, but I was very happily surprised as I continued to read it.

Rodgers ups the stakes considerably in Blood of the Children. In fact, it gets pretty grueling. If you are the kind of reader who draws the line at violence against children, I recommend that you avoid this novel. It's not as brutal as Ketchum's soul-numbing The Girl Next Door, but it's pretty disturbing. Also, if you dislike descriptions of animal abuse in fiction, stay far away from Blood of the Children.

I thought it was pretty damned good. Very well written, constantly surprising, and frightening enough to satisfy the most ardent literary gorehound.

See, this stone is controlling the children in Green Hill, and it is making them torment the new boy. There really isn't a whole lot of logic here, but Blood of the Children works despite that. It definitely deserved a larger readership.

Part of the problem was the cover. Just look at it. It does fit the story, but potential horror readers probably did not look twice at the book. The cover brings to mind a steamy dark romance, and Blood of the Children is anything but that. I see it as kind of a gateway between the mostly bucolic horror fiction of the early-to-mid 1980's, and the stronger and more visceral writing that came later.

It's a damned shame that it took the man's death to make me seek out Alan Rodgers' novels. Now I wish I had read Blood of the Children sooner, and maybe even written him via his website, and let him know that I really enjoyed his book.

No comments

The author does not allow comments to this entry