FORGOTTEN BOOK: THE BLACK CAROUSEL

The Black Carousel by Charles Grant  (1995)

Oxrun Station is a small Connecticut town.  If you looked at any decent and true map you find it is located just south of The Twilight Zone, a place where horrors sneak up on the unsuspecting populace.  It is also a location where Charles L. Grant set a full dozen of his best horror novels and collections.  for reaspns best known to the publisher, Tor, The Black Carousel, the last of Oxrun Station books, is signed by "Charles Grant," rather than the more familiar "Charles L. Grant."

It's a collection of four linked stories.  In the background (and, sometimes, the foreground) of each is the Pilgrim's Rest, a traveling carnival which spends a part of its season -- be it a few days, a few weeks, a few months; there seems to be no set pattern or reason -- in Oxrun Station.  It appears to be located on an abandoned property that is far too small to hold it.  Among the many rides and attractions of the carnival is the carousel, a merry-go-round painted completely black.  Some of the people who ride on the Black Carousel have strange, sometimes terrifying, experiences.  The people who are at the center of the four stories have one thing in common -- loneliness.

Casey Bethune is the local postman.  He drinks too much.  His knowledge of the townspeople comes from the type of mail they receive.  He is awkward nd lonely and afraid to put himself out there to have any sort of relationship.  Then he meets Corri Pilgrim, a strange and attractive woman who works at the carnival.  He is attracted to her and she convinces him to ride on the carousel.  It's a ride that takes him beyond reality,  A ride that never stops...

Fran Lombaird is twelve and has just moved to Oxrun with her family and she hates it.  The quiet  suburban life is nothing like the life she had back in Cambridge.  Her father, though, has taken an ill-advised risk and moved to Oxrun to begin a new business, one that is doomed from the beginning and one that outs a large strain on his marriage.  Fran eventually meets some girls her own age and begins to hang out with them.  She also meets Chip Clelland, a boy about her age who may be a ghost.  She sees chip and his current girlfriend ride the Black Carousel.  Later Chip and girl break up and the girl dies from cancer.  In fact, every girl Chip has broken up with has died of one form of cancer or another.  Now Chip is interested in Fran...

Drake Saxton is twenty, going to the local college and working part-time at the local paper.  He lives a suffocating life with his mother, who has managed to make ends meet by selling insurance ever since Drake's father walked out when he was nine.  But there are hint's that Drake's father did not walk out on his family.  Drake's aunt, his mother's sister. married well and has a successful husband and three rather obnoxious kids; her favorite sport in life appears to be denigrating Drake's mother.  Now they are coming for aa visit and, because his mother has to work late, it's up to Drake to ready the house for their visit and to buy food to feed them.  That  done, Drake still has some time left before the visit, so he goes to the carnival with his friend Jill.  Jill wants to go on the more adventurous rides and does so alone, while Drake goes on the Black Carousel.  Now Drake is wandering the carnival, but reality is shifting and he is hallucinating about his mother's family. where each is going through a horrific death.  Before the night is over, Drake decides that he must take control of his life and to stop being intimidated by his mother and by her horrid family.  But Drake was not the only one to ride the Black Carousel and the control he is seeking is not to happen, even when his aunt, uncle, and cousins die in a horrid accident...

Kayman Kalb is old, nearly eighty.  He talks to the ghosts of his past.  Although he is not married to Estell, they have been living together for twenty years, and Estelle is not doing well.  Her children, who never cared for Kayman, want to take Estelle to Georgia, where they can place her in a nursing home and look after her.  Kayman's wife, who had died many years ago, now comes to talk with him -- something that hadn't happened for over a year.  The ghosts of his past are hinting that something is coming, and Kayman is afraid what that something might be.  He has alienated the one living person he could talk to -- a psychiatrist, more of a friend than a doctor -- and when he goes to try to apologize finds that she has been killed in an automobile accident.  The older he gets, the more his past moves away from him.  The his dead wife takes him by the hand and places him on the Black Carousel...

Eerily disturbing and atmospheric, with pinpoint characterizations.

Charles L. Grant (1942-2006) was a huge proponent of "quiet horror," at a time when splatterpunk was beginning to become a major influence in the field.  He not only led by example with finely crafter novels and stores, but was an influential anthologist, most notably of the acclaimed Shadows of eleven anthologies.  Not to be satisfied with one genre, he was also a Hugo-winning science fiction author, the writer of some of the wildest comic fantasies out there (one of which had what I consider to be the perfect title for such a work:  668:  The Neighbor of the Beast), best-selling historical romances, a Young Adult science fiction invasion series, gothic thrillers, and media tie-ins.  He sued the pseudonyms Felica Andrews, Deborah Lewis, Stephen Charles, as well as (and there's a theme here) Lionel Fenn, Timothy Boggs, Simon Lake, and Mark Rivers.  He famously threw a "I sold a hundred books so why aren't I rich?" party.  He died far too young of COPD but left a legacy that any writer could be proud of.  All of his books are highly recommended.  (Well perhaps not the movie tie-in novel for Hudson Hawk, the month he spent writing that onw was evidently torture.)