Haven by Tom Deady
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
When I pick up a book by an author I’m not familiar with, I do it because the story interests me, or I heard something positive about it, or it was on sale.
What I don’t do is familiarize myself with the author before reading, and so it was that I found out afterward that Haven is Tom Deady’s first novel. It is also the 2017 Bram Stoker Award winner for First Novel.
There are things I enjoyed about the story, an old-fashioned horror novel about a monster lurking in the lake of a small town–and the perhaps more menacing human monsters that work and live around the lake–but I found the story dragged on too long and the melodramatic writing was distracting at best and eye-rolling at worst. I read through to the end but didn’t feel much reward for having done so.
Given the reviews and awards, it may be that I’m just not getting the tone Deady was going for. He renders the characters well for the most part, though some of the supporting characters are typical small town stereotypes, and all of them tend to be overly explicit in their thoughts and actions. Subtlety is not merely tossed out the window here, it is packaged up and shipped over to the other side of the world.
In Haven the sheriff is a cartoonishly evil man with an equally cartoonishly evil son. They serve as the primary antagonists while the monster–the design of which brings to mind the car devised by Homer in The Simpsons in how it’s a conglomeration of mismatched parts intended to be the ultimate representation of its form–occasionally devours, but more often just weirdly mutilates and kills people who get a bit too close to the lake.
The mystery is slowly revealed over the length of the novel, mostly by having characters remember key details from the past piece-by-piece as their minds struggle with the wicked effects of alcohol, mental trauma or both. Conveniently, everyone remembers everything before the story ends.
The whole thing is hokey and kind of silly and I’m actually okay with that, but the writing ranges from a plain meat-and-potatoes quality to stuff that would have benefited from a more discerning editor. Observe:
“Shut the hell up. Who the hell do you think you’re talkin’ to, your freak friend, huh, Father?” The last word he literally spit out, spraying the priest with drops of saliva.
Eddie’s body was literally in pieces.
It hadn’t rained all summer, literally.
He was literally doubling over he was laughing so hard.
Women had never been a problem anyway, but after nailing Greymore, they literally threw themselves at him.
Next he stole a glance at his partner in crime—literally.
What if his little sermon had worked, and Jake had gone off half-cocked (literally) to the lake to find the thing himself?
And my personal favorite:
The ground was literally shaking under their feet as rocks rained down.
Not figuratively shaking, no sir. This ground was literally shaking. It was the real deal, shaking-wise.
The point of these examples (and there are many others) is that any good editor would have stroked out that one word without hesitation and made every sentence better as a result. That this was not done does Tom Deady no favors as a writer.
But I will say this–while I found the ending ultimately unsatisfying and the story overly long, I kept plugging away at it, anyway, so Deady obviously managed to capture enough of that old-fashioned monster horror novel thing to keep me engaged. If he continues to write and gets better help with editing and revision, his workman-like prose can only improve. He can tell a story so I see promise here.