How D'you Like Them Apples?: The Orchard by Charles L. Grant

                                                                         

The Orchard was the first of the Oxrun Quartet I read, based on Will Errickson's coverage of it. It's also, unfortunately, the weakest. 

Weak is a relative term when talking about Grant's work; some of the stuff here is as strong as ever, but the issue is consistency. There are exciting set-ups, terrifying middles, and all-star endings in The Orchard, but never all three in the same story. But still. . .let's go apple-picking!

Prologue 

Synopsis: Oxrun Station's police chief, the venerable Abe Stockton, is dying. He takes his friend (Grant?) out to the titular orchard and hands him some documents to read, all related to the orchard.

Thoughts: Melancholy, to be sure, and Grant's atmospheric writing is in place from the first page. However, the setup here isn't convincing; after the stately yet playful introduction to Nightmare Seasons, we're dumped unceremoniously into the stories. There's no, for lack of a worse word, foreplay. 

My Mary's Asleep 

Synopsis: A group of college students, including artsy, brooding Herb and the lovely object of his unrequited desire Mary, have a picnic in the orchard before finals. Before the night is over, Mary's boyfriend is dead and the group starts to fragment.  

Thoughts: Grant is usually charitable towards his main characters, but Herb is a deliberately unlikable creep out of a Richard Laymon novel, right down to his perving on his comely young aunt whom he lives with. Herb sucks, which is the point, but it doesn't make the story an enjoyable read 

The ending, though. . .

More than that, Grant sells the emotional heart we didn't realize the story had; the cost of Herb's nastiness and emptiness is a bleak withering that claims the lives of  his friend group and causes his own ample flesh to melt away. The last two or three pages are dark moments of self-revelation and an endless night of the soul, and it pays everything off.

I See Her Sweet and Fair 

Synopsis: A love triangle between a cop and two women is complicated by a string of gruesome murders

Thoughts:  Picks up from the events of "My Mary's Asleep," with Amy, the girlfriend of Herb's dead friend, as one of the girls involved with our hero's son Les. As it turns out, this doesn't have anything to do with the Orchard; it shows up, once, as a make-out spot, but it's a red herring.  

There's a lot wrong with this story, and common wisdom would have it it's because of the ludicrous ending. However, on a re-read, the ending is almost the only thing right with the story. I don't need hyper-accurate police procedural quality in my fiction (indeed, it can get tedious), but this is the most lackadaisical serial killer investigation I've seen in some time, even if Oxrun Station is small. The mystery around the culprit is underbaked, and the final explanation (which is an intriguing idea) is told to us instead of shown. I think the story is good conceptually, but to fit into the novella length, it needs to be told by someone more directly involved with the murders. As it is, the signal to noise ratio is off.

Then there's the ending, which outraged me the first time I read it as being completely goofy and out of left field. The second time, though, I think it's the best part of the story, and if it were better set up and supported, it would be beautiful. Taken on their own, the images conjure wonder and fear. As presented here, it is all a bit silly.

The Last and Dreadful Hour 

Synopsis: A storm traps a group of people in a movie theater. There's no way out, so why are their numbers dwindling?

Thoughts: The highlight of the book;  It doesn't feel derivative, even though there's stuff in here that feels like everything from The Mist to Demons. It does get a bit repetitive--of the three Rio Bravo stories that appear in the Oxrun Quartet, this is arguably the lightest on incident--and the character work feels lighter as well. 

However, this has one of Grant's best endings--not a shocker, but a thoughtful and disturbing execution of one of fiction's most maligned twists.  Grant's played with this idea once before, in the same context: In "Night's Swift Dragons," he introduced it (and then discarded it, more's the pity, since I'm not a huge fan of that ending).  

This is an ending that seeps into your bones like the cold. 

Screaming, in the Dark 

Synopsis: A snoopy reporter finds himself bedridden in a hospital where something is happening to the pediatric patients. 

Thoughts: Dennis Etchison gave us "Talking in the Dark"; Grant raises him a scarier verb and well-placed punctuation for one of his all-time best titles. If only the story were as good.

So far, we've had three stories with uneven middles but with memorable conclusions (even if one of those conclusions is memorable for being stupid as well as beautiful). Here, we have a story with great buildup that fizzles into nothing. 

Back to Etchison for a moment--we have a story that reminds me of his work--most notably the "transplant trilogy" from The Dark Country, with its sinister medical bureaucracy. And that is what's frightening about hospitals, isn't it? Not just the sickness and the death, that's scary everywhere. What's disturbing about hospitals is that there's a bureaucracy around it all, a whole accumulation of human activity that is (to some degree, by necessity) distant from the human suffering involved.

There's also the cryptic references to disappearances going on in the community, which reminds me of the allusive nature of Etchison's work. But in Etchison, and in Etchisonian stories like "Dialing the Wind" (which we'll get to next week), the loose ends don't feel like red herrings; they feel like things that are connected, but they're just out of your reach, no matter how many California highways you speed down, chasing the last rays of sunlight and salvation. Here, everything feels promising but undeveloped. 

It is frustrating because the middle is scary, and on paper it's building up to a horrific crescendo using the great title as the final lines. I read the words on the page and they feel like they should scare me. If only I had a link to what was going on. 

What, precisely, any of this has to do with The Orchard is unclear. There is a nifty bit where our hero's visitor brings him a fruit basket with an apple from The Orchard, which is a very clever way to introduce a link, but that's about all there is. 

Epilogue

Synopsis: Our narrator mulls over the stories and mourns the imminent passing of his friend Abe Stockton.

Thoughts: A weak end to a comparatively weak book. The emotional center of the wraparound is wholly different than that of the books themselves, which just adds to the feeling that we've been baited and switched by the "premise" of The Orchard. I don't need some big explanation of "why" the orchard is bad or how Oxrun Station or Greystone Bay work, 

Something that didn't work for me the first time I read this, and is more glaring in contrast to the other three books, is the lack of female perspective. I need to be clear, here: I am not saying "The Orchard doesn't have any stories centering a woman's perspective, therefore it's bad." So what am I saying?

The stories in the Oxrun Quartet (and other Grant stories I've read) all have a certain amount of men going around mooning after women and/or fumbling with pursuing women who inexplicably are into them, and of course there's nothing wrong with that. The problem is this: Grant is equally good, I think, at writing male and female main characters; maybe a little better at writing men, but then he was a man, so that's understandable. He's also good, when writing female leads, at giving the male supporting cast dynamism and depth. For example, "Thou Need Not Fear My Kisses, Love" has a well-drawn cast of supporting men and a good female protagonist. But, in general, the inverse doesn't  hold: At least in the four books I've read recently, the female supporting cast for his male-centric stories just doesn't feel fleshed out. 

Sometimes that may because they're supposed to be enigmatic, or because their reality as women and as living humans is in fact in question. Again, fair enough, and I'm not extending that criticism to masterpieces like "Now There Comes a Darker Day," "The Sweetest Kiss," or "The Chariot, Dark and Low", to name three pieces from the Oxrun Quartet. 

Here, though, we wind up with story after story of men where the women only feel like props in the men's stories. If you squint, you can chalk up the lack of dynamic women in "My Mary's Asleep" to the fact that Herb is a self-centered, obsessive creep who doesn't really care about the women he ostensibly loves (and he's not that much better about his erstwhile male friends), while the one-dimensionality of the three women in "Screaming, in the Dark" may be linked to their possibly supernatural existence. But that still leaves us with two stories that are clunkers in this regard, and the cumulative effect over four is a bit tiresome. 

The good news is that any bad taste of mealy apples will vanish with the next, and best, book of the Oxrun Quartet...coming very soon!