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Title: The Beyond Author: Barry Harrington Hardback: 273 pages Publisher: Diamond/Charter (1991) Amazon: Instant Look Up Appraising Eyeballs: |
About the Book:
Home Is Where the Horror Is.
Twenty years ago, two little
girls were attacked in the quiet town of Groveland. Only one survived.
Today Susan Holland is coming
home to face her past…
Home to her mother’s
funeral. Home to a town shattered by
fear. Home to witness the horrifying
results of a medical experiment that isolates the soul’s transition from life
to death.
In Groveland, the dead are
rising from their graves. And they have
a message for Susan: You can’t go home
again—and live.
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Bruce’s Appraisal: Ten year olds Susan Holland
and Michelle Abel were the best of friends.
Inseparable and irrepressible, they had the whole world, and their
whole lives ahead of them in rural Groveland, New York. But then Louie Percival and Dannie Dayton
did something terrible, something that has followed Susan all the way into
the present. Some books, you pick up
and read. Other books pick you up and don’t let you get
away. The Beyond by Barry Harrington, held me in a relentless grip for
a day and a half. Life forced me to stop
in the middle, or it would have taken half that long. A quick read, this short
novel, published only in paperback, seems disposable by its melodramatic
cover and the blurb text on the reverse.
But, like all successful fiction, the been-there plot melding sci-fi
and horror pales next to the living protagonists. I stumbled across The Beyond in an old book bag, where it had languished since it
came home with me from a flea market a few years ago. The first chapter piqued my interest, but
in the second chapter lay magic. As I
finished that second chapter, I knew that this book possessed a special
quality that surpassed genre. In chapter two, Harrington
takes us into the past, when Susan Holland and her beau Justin Nesbitt were
in high school. We get to know these
two through the love they share, all the while Harrington weaves imagery that
captures the impossible tangle of emotion that exists around first love. In that second chapter, The Beyond transports us back to high
school with them, to those feelings that you might suffocate in these
feelings of true love, those feelings that you might want to. By the end of
this chapter, Susan and Justin are clearly characters of relevance. These are characters worth following through
any adventure. Over that day and a half of
reading, the blurb’s promise of the dead rising proved true, and in a unique
way which took a little getting used to.
Ultimately, I came to appreciate the approach. After all, if the dead exist beyond our
three dimensions, and the dead return, then there’s room to believe that they
might not fit within the confines that held them in life. And, if time is just one more dimension,
then the return of the dead might well juxtapose us to a melding of that
dimension in ways we just aren’t meant to experience. There is a real sci-fi
element to this novel, and one that I’m not a hundred percent positive needed
to exist in order for the story to follow nearly the same trajectory from
start to finish. A handful of
characters would have to have been recast, or at least introduced under
different circumstances, but overall the book could have gone straight horror
and worked as well. Perhaps that’s a
personal preference, though; the sci-fi didn’t not work, but it didn’t mesh smoothly with the grotesque zombie
arms on the cover and the apocalyptic blurb on the back… What really makes this book
stand out—what makes Susan and Justin into such weighty characters—is the
language. Harrington thanks Ray Bradbury
in the Author’s Note, and October
Country gets a nod in the novel itself.
The writing of The Beyond flows
like a Bradbury tale. Harrington
carries on the same love affair with autumn, capturing the poetry of the
idyllic New York countryside with no less aplomb. But this isn’t a Ray Bradbury tale. What this book feels like, more than
anything, is this: What if, after writing Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury set out to write a Stephen King novel? That’s how this book
feels. The subject matter is darker
than a Bradbury tale, and far more abrupt.
The dialogue is free of the elder statesman’s restraint. People are grabbed by the balls, and things
are jabbed into eyes; foreshadowing emerges to tell you the things you don’t
want to know, but makes you crave more, crave a reason, crave justice;
the horror is aggressive and personal.
The plot is The Dead Zone meets
Needful Things, all translated
through the lens of a man in love with the language and imagery of the
season. A novel takes me a month to
read. A short one like this, maybe two
weeks. This one took two days. I can’t give higher praise than that. This is a bit of genius, and Amazon has
used copies on sale for less than the price of shipping. Not for the faint of heart, but if you ever
longed for those high school days, then the second chapter of this book will
transport you there for a few, vivid minutes.
And, then, once you’re trapped, you’ll follow Susan to the very end. Delightful. |