Horror Review: Into The Pit (1989, Pocket Books)
Warning - Major Spoilers Ahead - Warning
For five years, Jason McGwire lived in his own personal hell, courtesy of Glenda. The first year of their marriage was great, but subsequent years saw Glenda changing. At first, it was just minor incidents of odd behavior which she'd snap out of after an hour or two. Some sort of mild depression, maybe, or a different kind of emotional problem.
Then it got worse.
Glenda started staying out overnight with a stranger she'd met while out shopping. The periods of sloth and inactivity increased in their intensity and duration. When she deigned to speak with Jason, her words were laced with venom, as though she were daring him to strike her or fight back. Then there were the suicide attempts...
Jason wanted his wife, his real wife, back from whatever forces had claimed her, but this was not to be. One dark night, Jason awoke to the smell of smoke to discover his house ablaze and Glenda nowhere in sight. Though he frantically searched the house, he was unable to find her. The investigation subsequently determined Glenda had died in the blaze, reduced to a charred corpse -- Jason was the sole survivor.
Now, Jason has moved to a small town in New Jersey, gotten remarried, and has a six month old son. Things couldn't be better...until Jennifer Wentworth enters his life. Professing to be a psychic, Jennifer says she's been contacted by a spirit who wants to speak to him. The spirit's name is Glenda. She doesn't feel a little problem like death should keep the two of them apart any longer. She's come to drag Jason back to the darkness with her, but she's not above pulling his wife and son along for the ride...into the pit.
Warner Lee is the pen name of Brinton Warner Battin, a guy who lives in New Jersey and writes books about terrible things happening to otherwise good people. I found my copy of Into the Pit for a couple bucks at one of the local used bookstores I frequent/haunt, and decided to take a chance. Being a late 80's release from Pocket, it has the obligatory cover enhancement in that lovely red foil lettering which is done so well it looks embossed from a distance even though it isn't.
Usually with new authors I try to start with their first book and work my way forward, but much of Battin's output (including the three titles he published as Warner Lee) is out of print -- in physical format, at least -- so this was what I had to work with.
Into the Pit starts off strong. Battin has a fine sense of detail and pacing, which is to be expected since this is his ninth novel. His characters are well-developed. He has a terrific ear for dialog and banter, and much like Jason sets up pretty exteriors in his work as a landscape architect, Battin builds a quality framework around the mystery at the center of the novel.
To wit: the question the reader should be asking after about five pages is, "Who is Glenda, and why does she hate Jason so vehemently?" Rather than drop the answer right in our lap, Battin spends much of the rest of the book doling out this background information in small dribbles, flashbacks of Jason's life prior to meeting his current wife Nyssa, when he and Glenda were together.
It's painful, especially as a married man who loves his own wife to pieces, to watch Glenda slowly turn Jason's life upside down for no appreciable reason. Jason's a hardworking, caring husband who never neglects or belittles his wife, and in fact, Jason tries his best to reconcile what's going on with her and why she's changing instead of driving straight to a divorce attorney and cutting his ties.
In the present, we know Glenda wants Jason, and she's not above harming his family to get his attention. She's fixated on the local mortuary as a possible entry into the real world from wherever it is she's currently residing, and strange things start happening in and around the building as a result. Visitors hear odd whispers and feel the limbs of corpses grabbing at their bodies. An odd green fog seeps from the sewer drains and the refrigeration units. Bloody messages appear on mirrors. The naked dead appear to sit up and walk around at all hours of the night. It's all quite unsettling.
Then the evil begins to spread, as Glenda's power over others begins to grow. An otherwise normal socialite suddenly steals a baby from its stroller for no reason. Jason's wife Nyssa is assaulted in her shower at home by a decaying arm reaching out of the drain (the image depicted on the cover). A local teenager gets the urge to visit the home of a family he's never met, with devious deeds on his mind. And local practicing psychic Jennifer Wentworth keeps trying to convince Jason that she's receiving direct communications from a woman she's never met.
I was 100% on board with Battin's story, which was trending around the 3.5 - 4.0 star mark, up until his reveal of why Glenda has a post-incineration hate-boner for Jason, and then it all came crashing down.
See, throughout the story, the reader is given some subtle clues that the things Jason is remembering, the things we're seeing from the point of view of his memories in the flashback chapters, may not be telling the whole story. In fact, considering how much hell Glenda's going through and the danger she appears to be putting herself in, by attacking him from the afterlife, it's hard not to wonder just what the hell Jason did to her. Is it possible, I asked myself more than once, there's more to Jason than meets the eye? Is there something to his reluctance to talk about Glenda with Nyssa?
At one point late in the story, Jennifer receives a psychic vision that seems incredibly real: Jason, holding a solid length of lead pipe, assaults Glenda in her sleep, caving her head in. He then changes into his pajamas, dribbles gasoline throughout the house, and strikes a match. Standing in the doorway until he can no longer stand the heat and smoke, he staggers into the night, dramatically dropping to the grass, screaming that he wasn't able to find his wife as the flames consume his home.
An interesting quandary has now arisen: did Jason, faced with similar circumstances as James Sunderland in Silent Hill 2, murder his mentally-unstable wife to end her suffering and release himself from the trauma of dealing with emotional instability?
Had that been the case, I'd have high-fived Battin for pulling a well-executed bait-and-switch with the reader's sympathies, making us root for the antagonist who suddenly has a damn good reason for wanting to torment her ex-husband from beyond the grave. Unfortunately, such is not the case.
The real reason Glenda descended into madness and made Jason's life a living hell for five years? Why was Glenda such a ferocious bitch? Why does she hate him, and want him to suffer in everlasting pain and torment?
Because she just does.
I still want to deliver that high-five to Battin, but now I want to deliver it upside his cranium. The evil antagonist is evil because...she is evil.
The asshole in my head, the anti-Zorker if you will, reacts this way: "Well shit, son, don't that just simplify everything? The bad woman's bad because she's bad, y'unnerstand? Why don't you get it? I'm sitting here telling you how bad she is, and you keep wanting to ask 'why' like some kind of William W. Johnstone-hating liberal commie pinko sonuvabitch. The hell's the matter with you?"
The real Zorker, who respects things like plot and character development, just shakes his head at what might have been. Thus, instead of a complex, rational storyline where people like Glenda are explored to try and explain their behavior, we get a shrug of the shoulders from the author and an "I don't know." How disappointing.
Now, an "I don't know" can be terrifying if handled in the right way. But this ain't it. And more's the pity, because up until that point, Battin had a good thing going. But then, as if to add insult to injury, the author tacked on a final page of the "the madness isn't over yet" variety which has zero bearing on anything else that has happened in the story and serves only to set up the possibility of a sequel. Thankfully, as far as I can tell, that never happened, but Battin's still alive and kicking so I guess one never knows.
That possibility is far more terrifying to me than anything he wrote in the actual book itself.
Two grotesque sewer hands out of five.