1-800-WIND: Dialing the Wind by Charles L. Grant

                                                                              

                                                                               

We're back with the best of the Oxrun Quartet. The only quibble I have here is that the ostensible throughline (the mysterious music) doesn't quite work; it sets up a neat stinger at the end but that's it. However, this collection more than the rest gives the feeling of Oxrun Station as a town; you feel the community breathing (and sometimes ceasing to breathe) as the stories unfold. 

Prologue:

Synopsis: Abe Stockton has died (as we learned in the last installment), and the narrator is meeting with Callum Davidson (owner of the movie theater which featured in "The Last and Dreadful Hour") to go through the police chief's effects and find some notes related to a long-gone country group.

Thoughts: It's fine, although not exciting or atmospheric enough to feel like more than a speedbump on the way to the stories. 

Dialing the Wind

Synopsis: A young widow, recently moved to Oxrun Station, 

Thoughts: Charlie Grant's Steel Magnolias! Not exactly, but the similarities are there, with much of the story involving the lives of women in a small town revolving around a small business. But, as tear-jerking as Steel Magnolias is, this is bleaker. 

There's something about this story that reminds me of, you guessed it, Dennis Etchison (we haven't talked about him for a while here!). I think it's the focus on mass communication. Much of Etchison's work is set against the backdrop of film and television, and Etchison's haunted California is a distinctly modern setting, where the insanity of mass culture and modern living spills over into blood-drenched freeways, zombie gas stations, coin laundry madwomen and sadistic pitchmen. The notion of a radio broadcast carrying death and/or salvation through the air to lonely and wounded women is profoundly Etchisonian. 

A cryptic, haunting tragedy. 

The Sweetest Kiss

Synopsis: A financial planner in the midst of a midlife crisis reconnects with his high school flame. 

Thoughts: This one does seem more attenuated in its link to the music or the wind; in reality, this story provides the narrative spine for the book, since it informs the events of the next two stories ("The Chariot, Dark and Low" in particular). This is a tale of disintegration in every sense--physical, financial, psychological. Sometimes these stories are too agonizing to read, as a character spirals down, but Grant makes it not only readable, but entertaining. 

Grant not only writes it well, he recombines the elements effectively, in particular by leaning into some gnarlier angles than you might expect given his 'shadowpunk' reputation and the almost abstract nature of the first story. 

This is another example of an underappreciated element of Grant's writing, which is a dark eroticism. Similar to his treatment of violence, his treatment of sex is restrained and focuses on the emotional and psychological meanings behind desire and acting on that desire, and all points in between. The beating, bloody heart of the book. 

As We Promise, Side by Side

Synopsis: A woman's house protects her from her vengeful ex-husband's rampage. And everything else. 

Thoughts: It's this installment's Rio Bravo set-up, and it's also the straight-up scariest story of the book, and maybe of the whole Quartet. This isn't quiet, this is loud--almost implausibly loud, as a vengeful ex-husband does a one-man Assault on Precinct 13 routine against his old neighborhood. That's just the set-up, though. . . 

It's insane, and gruesome, and all over the place, but despite its grisly bombast, it never stops being psychologically and emotionally grounded. Imagine a Steve Rasnic Tem/Lucio Fulci collaboration and you're on the right track. 

And, just when the intensity seems to dip down, Grant closes it out strong. 

The Chariot Dark and Low

Synopsis: A man tossed by personal and professional turmoil finds himself very alone on what should be the happiest night of his life. . .

Thoughts: The continued fallout of the Kanfield firm's dissolution extends to former employee Nelson, who finds himself unemployed, burning through his savings, and madly in love. Nelson is sympathetic, but Grant's depiction of this somewhat feckless man, flailing around for love less for the bond itself than for proof that he still has value, is devastating. You could, in fact, get a very good "straight", non-supernatural story out of this, because (for the discerning reader), the real hook is not "what if everyone vanished" (we've all seen and read this), but "what if a woman disappeared immediately after accepting your marriage proposal?"

It's cruel and clever; it reminds me a little of the non-violent savagery of Chet Williamson's "The Moment the Face Falls" in how it takes a desperate man from a high point to a low. And that's just the beginning. I like how Grant inverts the scenario of "As We Promise, Side by Side"--in that story, our heroine is unable to leave the house, whereas here it's being unable to get in that's the literalized metaphor.

Epilogue

Synopsis: Our narrators finish reading the notes and make a discovery about the musicians we might have suspected. 

Thoughts: The music is something of a red herring--the implication from the book cover copy is that there's a causal element to hearing the music and bad things happening, but I think it's more of an omen. The actual through-line in this cycle is Kanfield and his firm, and I like the grotesque inversion of It's a Wonderful Life, as we see how one man's actions have an impact on a whole town.