Steve Bailey's Blog : Review of WHISPER DOWN THE LANE

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Contributor’s Book Tip (May 2021)

Whisper Down the Lane by Clay McLeod Chapman

Reviewed by STEVE BAILEY

WHENEVER I read a good suspense thriller, a feeling comes over me, a haunting sensation that lingers with me even when I am away from the pages. It is a feeling I first experienced when I read The Exorcist. I got it again reading Clay McLeod Chapman’s novel Whisper Down the Lane.

This story has its bases on a phenomenon that emerged in the 1980s, and is still around, known as the Satanic Panic. It is a conspiracy theory that holds that devil worshippers infiltrate schools and day-care centres to perform abusive rituals on children.

The spark that started this psychotic inferno was two trials in California in the 1980s. It was alleged that interrogators manipulated children into telling stories of ritual abuse performed by their teachers. There were no convictions in either trial.

I am fond of novels with two stories set in different times simultaneously running and ultimately fusing. I know they will, but the how and when of this blending is part of the suspense. In Whisper Down the Lane, one story takes place in the early 1980s and provides a fictionalized version of those California trials.

Chapman (left) puts us inside the mind of Sean, a lonely five-year-old boy desperate to please adults. Confused by a malicious adult interrogator who rewards statements that fortify the conspiracy theory and punishes those that contradict it, Sean tells her what she wants to hear. It is easy to see how the actual children in California would fabricate a story under that kind of pressure.

Woven into the storyline is the culture of the 1980s, “I’ d like to teach the world to sing…”, the cassette tape, He-Man, and the hauntingly beautiful Orinoco Flow by Enya Patricia Brennan. Chapman peppers his novel with references like this one to well-known horror stories, and they appear throughout the book like the diamonds in The Legend of Zelda. Horror fans will find these gems delightful.

The other story takes place in 2013 and is the driving force of the narrative. Richard, the protagonist, tries to build a life with his new wife and her son from a previous marriage. But strange things begin to happen, things that appear to lead to another round of Satanic Panic. What is the source of these manifestations? Is it the grey spectre that frequently appears in the novel, silent, unmoving like an image in a black and white photograph? Is Richard not who he claims to be? Or is it something altogether different?

Like a car speeding through the night on some diabolic mission, this story is fast-paced. Chapman spends little time describing surroundings and uses a variety of techniques to stay focused on the action. Good people and pets die, pentagrams and bizarre polaroid pictures mysteriously appear, and accusations destroy lives in this well-crafted horror story.

***

Steve Bailey is a freelance writer living in Richmond, Virginia. Earlier in life, he wrote stories and reviews for two English language newspapers in Panama, The Panama American, and The Star and Herald. A list of his recent published pieces can be found on his blog: https://vamarcopolo.blogspot.com/.

BOOK REVIEW

History has not paid much attention to first ladies and Jefferson Davis’ wife, Varina, less than most. The Civil War itself took up most of that space. Still, the woman's story in Charles Frazier’s book Varina is of a woman who married a man much older than herself and did not share in his political philosophy. This mother lost all but one of her children before they had grown up and lived out her life with the legacy of the failed Confederacy that she neither sought nor wholly accepted. This is a framed story, that is, a story within a story. Varina Davis, the only first lady of the Confederacy, tells her life story in a disconnected fashion to a young black man, James Blake, who begins visiting the eighty-year-old widow in a sanitorium where she is trying to recover from drug addiction. Blake wants to understand his own identity as Jimmie Limber, the black child whom Mrs. Davis rescued from a savage beating on a city street in Richmond, Virginia, and took in to be raised among her children. In response to Blake’s questions, Varina starts her story with her escape from Richmond, as this capital of the Confederacy fell to Union troops in the final stages of the American Civil War. She and her husband travel separately from each other physically and in the goals they have in mind for their respective journeys. She wants to escape and not return. Jefferson Davis, on the other hand, delusional that the confederacy had not been thoroughly defeated, wanted to head west toward Texas, where there was a small pocket of resistance, and keep up the fight, a fight that had already cost the American people over 600,000 lives. A climax to this part of the story is reached when Jefferson Davis reunites with his wife in Georgia and, in doing so, brings on the wrath of the Federal troops who were pursuing him. He is arrested, and during this period, Jimmie Limber is separated from the Davises. Varina, whom Frazier refers to as V throughout the book, was convinced that had her husband left her alone, she would have made it to Cuba. Varina Howell was a young woman with no dowry when she met Jefferson Davis at a party in 1843. She was seventeen, and he was thirty-five. For her, it was not about love as much as her need for security. She was more interested in his property and material wealth than his political career or ideology. And yet she stood by him throughout his ill-fated venture as the one and only president of the Confederate States of America and campaigned to have her husband freed from incarceration in Fort Monroe, Virginia, Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain, about the journey home of a Confederate deserter in the closing days of the war, came out in 1997 and was a runaway bestseller. It was made into a movie starring Jude Law and Nicole Kidman. He uses a lyrical style, his descriptions are deep, and he puts a lot of meaning in a few words. Varina is Fraizer’s only other book with a Civil War setting. A phraseological slip-up appears when one character uses the expression “no worries,” an Australian phrase that was not part of the parlance of the nineteenth-century American language. Nevertheless, this is an engaging story about a woman few people know much about, probably because she was an outlier in the Civil War drama.

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Review of WHISPER DOWN THE LANE

Contributor’s Book Tip (May 2021)

Whisper Down the Lane by Clay McLeod Chapman

Reviewed by STEVE BAILEY

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