Daniel Mills
When I decided to take a break from reviewing a little more than six months ago, one of the main reasons was the dawning realization of the relative futility of reviewing books that few could afford to get their hands on. While many of the sort of books that get reviewed here continue to suffer from the effective scarcity that high prices create, newcomer Chômu Press has done its part to bring quality works to the masses by recently emerging as a purveyor of strange fiction at affordable prices.
Revenants by debut novelist Daniel Mills is the second Chômu Press book to be reviewed here at Speculative Fiction Junkie. It is the story of the isolated seventeenth century Massachusetts village of Cold Marsh, home to a small group of simple, religiously zealous people of a sort that will be familiar to readers of Nathaniel Hawthorne. In addition to religiously-based self repression, the villagers are oppressed by unbearable burdens of guilt for acts committed both individually and collectively, including the massacre of a group of Native Americans some years before. Shortly after the story opens, a young villager disappears, the third to do so. Three parties of villagers are sent into the surrounding wilderness to find her.
Mr. Mills expertly evokes the rhythms of colonial life, its closeness to nature. The reader constantly hears the sounds, smells the smells, and feels the weather of rural seventeenth century village life. Mr. Mills also does a great job of portraying Cold Marsh's isolation and the menace of the surrounding wilderness. The result is that the book steadily establishes a very compelling atmosphere early on, one that is simultaneously pastoral but tense. Unfortunately, while Mr. Mills' prose is occasionally brilliant and poetic, his descriptions eventually get to be a bit too long winded in my opinion. This dampens the effectiveness of the atmosphere that he has so capably crafted.
The prospect of three separate parties venturing into the menacing wilderness to search for the missing villager had great potential to both frighten and to allow the further exploration of various characters' unique burdens of guilt. Mr. Mills, though, seemed to focus most of his energy on the latter rather than the former. While this is certainly allowable, I couldn't help but feel that this portion of the book had much less of an emotional impact because of it. Instead of a high strung brew of fear and guilt, this part of the book felt more emotionally tepid than it might have. I also couldn't help but feel that this part of the book was too short. By the time the parties emerge from the wilderness, it felt as though they had been gone for just a few hours.
Revenants contains elements of the weird, mystery, and horror but it doesn't really excel at any of these aspects in particular. Nonetheless, Mr. Mills is clearly a writer to watch: but for a few balance issues and a failure to fully capitalize on the tension created in the first half of the book, Revenants would have been an excellent read.
Rating: 7/10
The True First
Revenants will be published by Chômu Press in February 2011 as a print on demand title.
[This review was based on a review copy]
4 comments:
I, too, thought the novel was somewhat unbalanced in its treatment of horror and the supernatural. But I appreciated the thorough treatment of history. I expect that Mills will work out his minor shortcomings with time and become equally great at writing horror and historical fiction.
I agree that Mills has a lot of promise and I am definitely open to reading future works by him.
I wondered while writing this review if I was being unfair by faulting him for not having the book be more of a horror novel. In the end, I decided that it was okay because he set the stage so well but then didn't really use it...
Glad to see the reviews coming back. Very interesting site.
Thanks Chris! Glad you like it :)
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