I had high hopes for Brian Evenson's The Open Curtain. I'd heard good things about it, and was intrigued by its violent storyline, revolving around a Mormon teenager who comes across newspaper articles chronicling a vicious murder. It's a horror novel and, having grown up with countless horror novels, I still like to revisit the genre from time. So the book stayed in the back of my mind for a few years, until I finally picked it up several months ago.

To be fair, my ambivalence towards The Open Curtain has a lot to do with horror as a genre. I'm twenty-seven years old, so I've never known a time when Stephen King wasn't publishing. The violent, graphic horror that he represents changed the landscape to the point where his work is the standard--this is how modern horror should be written, and his formula has worked so successfully that it's become tired and predictable. Whether one acknowledges it or not, anyone dabbling in horror owes him a huge debt.

And that's the problem with The Open Curtain: Evenson doesn't copy King's horror, but King's influence is so pervasive in the genre that it's inevitable readers will be reminded of him. After all the saturation, there just isn't much you can do with horror. The Open Curtain certainly follows King's three-act pattern: a scary, suspenseful opening, followed by a long interlude showing characters going about their lives, with the horror always lingering in the background, followed by a final, supernatural showdown wherein everything is (sort of) explained. Anyone familiar with King (and who isn't?) knows how silly and unsatisfying his endings are. That's the case with The Open Curtain: by the end of the book, one simply stops caring and wants things to be over.

Admittedly, this is my first dance with Evenson, but I found it easy to get distracted from The Open Curtain. I spent a few days wondering why this should be--the book isn't unbearably bad, but neither does it stay with you--then decided it had a lot to do with his writing style. Sure, his characters are dull and could've come out of any one of King's novels, but Evenson shows little personality in his writing, resulting in a dry, subdued novel. He doesn't seem to be taking any risks here, instead playing it safe, staying within the confines of King-style horror. The Open Curtain isn't an outright hack job, but its failings could be because of one of two things: either this was Evenson's first horror novel, or else Evenson has grown so accustomed to writing horror that the book was written on autopilot.

And this, sadly, is why The Open Curtain has no meat on its bones: I've read worse horror novels, but I've also read better.

Comments

[robot books]

If you're looking for a nice horror read that doesn't follow the Stephen King thread, I suggest The Angel Maker by Stefan Brijs - an interesting intermingling of science and religion translated from Dutch. But yes, you're spot on about how many contemporary horror novels are written.