FORGOTTEN BOOK: SOON SHE WILL BE GONE

 Soon She Will Be Gone by John Farris  (1997)

A complicated grotesquerie, a psychological murder tale/balancing act that reaches for the top but never goes over it.

Sharan Norbeth is an ex-Army CID officer who lost a hand in the field and now is eking out a living at a Georgia trailer park painting pictures with her left hand using house paint.  Sharan is blackmailed by the Assistant Attorney General of the United States to undercover and find evidence against the man whom he believes murdered his sister, Felicia.  Felicia was the latest in six women who have vanished without a trace after dating Dix Trevellian, a billionaire architect with a penchant for beautiful women with physical flaws.  Dix is subject to blackouts and fits of violence.  Sharan's DOJ handler is handicapped by once having an affair with Dix's sister and by having a severely ill fourteen-year-old daughter who may never live beyond her teens.  Dix's sister is Esther, a woman of astounding beauty and magnetism; she is socially important and runs the Trevellian Prize -- a biennial series of awards that have become more prestigious than the Noble Prizes.  Esther's mother had burned their house down, along with Esther's father, after finding him in bed with Esther when she was fourteen; a week or so later, while at her father's grave, Esther was struck by lightning and was unable to talk for half a dozen years.  Esther is "romantically unitarian," and well-versed in the sexual arts.  She loves her two brothers with a manic fierceness, perhaps in every sense of the word love.  The younger brother, Clay, is the genius who had expanded the family's fortune into the billions.  He is severely schizophrenic and has been missing for year, although recently he has been sending cryptic e-mails to his ex-brother-in-law, Dempsey Wingo.  Dempsey is a former bull rider, a successful playwright whose writing days are behind him, and an occasional bounty hunter for the INS.  Dempsey's brief marriage to Esther ended when he caught her in bed  with the lead actor in one of his plays; he then punched Esther out and took the actor, bound him hand and foot, placed him in a refrigerator box and buried the box (leaving an air hole to allow him to breathe, and then forgot about it for two days.  The actor is now Lew Carbine, the leading action star in the movies.  Carbine does not appear in the book for long -- his is killed in a violent explosion in his trailer on a movie set.  The complicated bomb, hidden in a well-crafted piece of Star Trek memorabilia, was likely placed by one of the Kregg's -- a large family of violent rednecks hired to do the Trevellians' bidding.  The most prominent Kegg is Mardie, Esther's former lover and current assistant, sycophant, dogsbody, and bodyguard; Mardie comes across as low intelligent and extremely dangerous.  Sharan's entry into the world of the Trevellians is Jules Brougham, Tevellian's next-door neighbor and the owner of perhaps the most prestigious art gallery in the world.  Brougham is blackmailed (a little matter of tax juggling that, if brought to court, could leave him bankrupt) into sponsoring a show of Sharan's art in his gallery.  Surprise, surprise, Sharan's left-hand, house paint artwork is good, really good, and soon she is the talk of the art world and she gets to meet all the (very) weird people who float in and out of the high stratosphere world of art and society. including the Trevellians.  Both Esther and Dix take an extreme interest in Sharan.

The stage is set.  Now Sharan has to avoid being killed, perhaps by one of the Trevellians, perhaps by the Kreggs, and perhaps as collateral damage by the feds.  And she has to figure out how six women could be killed in various parts of the world and all having their bodies completely vanish.  the six missing women are sometimes called the Six Sisters, a reference to mythology and the Pleiades.  But there were seven sisters in the Pleiades...Is Sharan fated to become the seventh sister?

A totally screwball setup. with each character odder that the others.  Yet Farris pulls it off in an engaging, readable novel that never descends to parody.  I stand in awe, wondering, how the heck did he do that?

John Farris (b. 1936) published his first novel, The Corpse Next Door, at the age of nineteen, followed by three crime novels under the name "Steve Brackeen" before he hit it big at age 23 with his first best-seller, Harrison High, a sort of Peyton Place-ish novel concentrating on the younger set, with a truly shocking (for the time) ending.  Harrison High was filmed in 1960 as Because They're Young, with Dick Clark, Tuesday Weld, Michael Callan, and Doug McClure, with Duane Eddy and James Darren in cameo roles.More novels followed.  His mainstream novel King Windom appeared in 1967, followed by another best-seller, When Michael Calls, filmed in 1972 as a popular television film (also released under the title Shattered Silence) starring Elizabeth Ashley, Ben Gazzara, and Michael Douglas.  The book has been credited with giving the rejuvenation of the horror novel a great assist.  From 1968 to 1974, Farris also published five paperback original sequels to Harrison High; Stephen King had said the Harrison High novels were a great influence.  Perhaps Farris's best-known novel is The Fury (1976), filmed by Brian De Palma from a screenplay by Farris in 1978, and starring Kirk Douglas and Amy Irving;  three sequels to the book were published, beginning in 2001.  Most of Farris's later work has been in the horror and thriller genres, and  he is known as a master of the Southern Gothic.  Many of his forty-two novels have appeared on the best-seller lists, including All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By, Son of Endless Night, and The Axman Cometh.