When the Wind Blows by John Saul, 1981
When the Wind Blows is an early John Saul book, his fifth horror novel published under his own name. It has the basic theme that made him an author with thirty-one best-selling novels: children in danger. The children may be young, or may be teenagers, but they always have some fantastic or supernatural force trying to destroy them, with innocent bystanders also suffering; at times, these children may also be the source of evil in the books. Saul's variations on this theme have led to a long, sustained career.
The scene here is the small town of Amberton, nestled in the Colorado Rockies. Unlike other mining towns, Amberton had no gold or silver, but it did have a large amount of coal, the mining of which provided the lifeblood of the town. Unique to the town was its chinook winds, heavy, blustering gusts that swam down from the mountains at frequent and unpredictable times. And when the winds blew, the cries of children could be heard. Supposedly these were the cries of stillborn Indian children well over a century old; the natives would take the bodies of these stillborn infants to a cave where they would await their chance to be reborn and to experience life for the first time. Of course, this was just a superstition; the white population of the town refused to believe it. Nevertheless, when the winds blew, bad things happened.
The winds were blowing fifty years before the main events of the novel. Dozens of miners. including mine owner Amos Amber, were deep in the mine when a wall let go and a torrent of water appeared, flooding the mine and killing all those below. Supposedly the miners had heard the cries of the children above the roar of the winds. At the same time the mine was destroyed, Amos amber's wife, Edna, went into labor with a child she never wanted. Edna, too, heard the wind and the cries of the children.
Now fifty years have passed and Edna is a bitter, mean-spirited, cruel, and selfish woman, living on the fading Amber ranch with her only child, Diana. Diana has been terrorized her entire life by her mother, who views Diana as mere chattel, someone to come at her every beck and call. in many ways Edna a has infantilized her daughter, never allowing her to grow up and mature into a full adult. Diana has severe memory lapses, usually when the wind blows; chunks of her life are gone and Diana does not even realize it. And Diana has a horrific secret that she has completely blocked from her life. Both Edna and Diana are reclusive, so the townspeople do not realize that each is insane.
Fifty years after the tragedy that closed down the mine and brought the town to financial ruin, Diana decides to reopen the mine. She places mining engineer Elliott Lyons, a widower with a nine-year-old daughter, in charge of the project. Lyons, a capable and careful man, never allowed anyone to go into the mine alone because of the potential danger. Nevertheless, when the wind was blowing, Lyons entered the mine by himself, fell into a large pit, and was killed. His daughter, Chrissie, having no other relatives, was brought to live with Diana for the time being. Diana, never having fully matured, nevertheless desperately wanted to have a child and she decided that Chrissie was that child; in her mind, Diana became Chrissie's mother and began to infantilize her as Edna had once done to Diana. Edna resents Diana's attention on Chrissie and begins to plot ways to get the young girl out of the house, one way or another...
What we have, in effect, is a good old-fashioned Southern Gothic, albeit set in the Rockies with supernatural elements.
Other players in this tragedy are Bill Henry, the local doctor who grew up with Diana and once was in love with her; over the year, that love morphed into mere affection and concern. Dan Gurley, the local sheriff, dislikes the suspicious thoughts he has about the Amber women. Esperanza Rodigues is the half-breed housekeepers for the Ambers; she is steeped in the superstitious beliefs of her people. When Esperanza's son, Juan, was born severely defective. her people wanted her to take the baby to the cave where the stillborn children -- the water babies -- had been placed and leave him there to die; Espernza refused because her son was not stillborn, and insisted on rising him herself. And then there were the children of the town -- Jeff, Kim, Steve, Jay-Jay, and Eddie -- all friends of Chrissie and her same age. These children goad one another into doing risky things, and some of them will die.
There's violence, both psychological and physical, but the worst violence is strangely not described viscerally. The unravelling of Edna and Diana and the slow display of their insanities is done well. Some minor threads are never explained but the break-neck pace at the end of the books allows the reader to forget about both them and various plot holes until long after the novel is put down.
There is an unexpected and horrifying coup de grace revealed in the book's final paragraph.
All in all, an effective horror novel with many unexplained parts. An interesting but uncomfortable read because of the child abuse. But child abuse, and the threat of child abuse, is a large part of what made Saul's books sell. I have to wonder, though, is this just a literary gimmick? Or does Saul truly not like children.
Saul (born 1942 and still living) has not published a book since 2009. His long-time partner of more than fifty year (and now husband) has anonymously collaborated on several of Saul's novels. Before Suffer the Children, the first novel published under his own name, Saul had written about ten other novels published under pseudonyms. Saul is also the author of a number of one-act plays. In 2023, he received the Bram Stoker Ward from the Horror Writers Association for Lifetime Achievement.
