Little Heaven by Nick Cutter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Little Heaven pays homage to both early Stephen King and low-budget gorefest movies of the 70s and early 80s. Rather than turn the “camera” away from a gruesome attack, pseudonymous author Nick Cutter zooms in to capture every detail. At times it seems like every other person, creature, and object in the story is “pissing blood.”
Shifting between 1966 and 1980 (the present day for the novel as written), Little Heaven tells the story of a self-styled Jim Jones who follows a voice from San Francisco into the wilderness of New Mexico to construct a religious compound where he and his followers live simple, God-fearing lives.
Except for all the monsters lurking in the woods, most of which seem to be amalgamations of various woodland creatures squashed together into multilegged, multi-headed horrors, all the better to bite, tear and create incidents of pissing blood.
In the 1966 portion, which comprises the bulk of the novel, a woman whose nephew is part of the commune hires three mercenaries/assassins to check out Little Heaven and see if the boy is okay. The three are broadly-drawn, one a black Englishman who all but “pip pip Cheerio’s” his way through the story, a feisty young woman with a sharp tongue and Roland DesChain from The Dark Tower. Whoops, I mean Micah Shugrue. A few of his rougher edges get sanded down in the 1980 part but the language and mannerisms of the character straddle a fine line between homage and rip-off. I didn’t mind that much since Roland is a terrific character to emulate, and his cadence and speech is perfect for a stoic and eminently practical sort of person.
This is old-fashioned horror through and through. The bad guys are very bad, the horrors are nigh-insanity inducing and have no small appetite for removing limbs from anyone they can catch up to, but while there are hints and suggestions, there’s ultimately no real explanation for why they exist and where they are from. They just are. I again didn’t mind this because it’s better than Cutter’s approach to the end of his novel The Deep, which overexplained to the point of undercutting much of the preceding story.
I was least fond of the 1980 section and here’s why: if you remove it in its entirety, the 1966 part still tells a complete story. The 1980 events implausibly set up a “noble sacrifice” but it’s so superfluous to the overall story that it has no emotional resonance.
The whole thing also felt longer than necessary, the equivalent of one of those low-budget gorefests running three hours. Cutting the 1980 segment would make the story tighter and, I think, better.
This is my least-favorite of the three Cutter novels I’ve read (the others being The Troop and aforementioned The Deep) but it’s still a decent read. For someone craving old school horror it may do the trick.