The Edge of Running Water by William Sloane

A year ago it would have seemed to me ridiculous to assume that there are some facts it is better not to know, and even today I do not believe in the bliss of ignorance or the folly of knowledge.  But this one thing is best left untouched.  It rips the fabric of human existence from throat to hem and leaves us naked to a wind as cold as the space between the stars.

1939

I still have in my possession a borrowed library copy of the 2015 edition of the 1964 omnibus The Rim of Morning: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror by William Sloane.  Last month I read the 1937 novel included in the book, To Walk the Night; let us now read the other novel it presents, 1939's The Edge of Running Water, which in this 21st century edition takes up 241 pages (split into 32 chapters.)

Our narrator for this caper is Richard Sayles, a professor of psychology thirty-three years old.  In the mysterious first chapter, which serves as a kind of prologue, he explains that he is writing this book to serve as a warning--he doesn't want any scientists out there pursuing the same line of research that his buddy Julian Blair did!  (The epigraph above comes from this initial chapter.)

As the narrative proper starts in Chapter 2, it is early morning and Sayles is getting off a train from New York in a small town in Maine, Barsham Harbor, a town where they don't much care for city folk!  I noted of To Walk the Night that Sloane put considerable effort into making the desert of the SouthWest feel like a lifeless wilderness; well, here he devotes plenty of scribbling to making Maine seem like a primitive depopulated wilderness whose few inhabitants are small-minded predatory hicks.  ("Don't leave New York," Sloane's body of work seems to be telling us.)  Sayles would rather not be there, but he has been summoned by his old friend and benefactor, electrophysicist Julian Blair, who I guess is like twenty years older than Sayles.  Sayles had not heard from Blair for over four years when he got the letter imploring him to come to Barsham Harbor just a few days ago.

When Sayles was an undergrad, Blair, a genius professor and researcher whose inventions greatly improved the efficiency of radio reception, took Sayles under his wing, giving him a job as his lab assistant so he wouldn't have to do menial jobs like wash dishes or tend lawns.  (This novel is full of middle-class condescension and contempt towards the working classes.)  Blair and Sayles became best friends and spent all their time together, and they even fell in love with the same woman, Helen Conner, a divorcee of Sayles's age who was raising her eleven-year-old sister, Anne.  Helen opted to marry the much older Blair, but Blair harbored no ill will towards either of them, remaining close friends to them and helping to raise Anne.  When Helen died like five years ago, three years after the wedding, it badly wounded Blair, who abandoned his university position and disappeared from view, ignoring letters from his friends and moving away without leaving an address.

A sneaky and nosy taxi driver takes Sayles to Blair's place six miles outside of the ugly town; this is an old mansion in a state of disrepair that sits only a few feet from a river.  At the mansion Sayles meets a fat woman, Mrs. Walters (I don't think we ever learn her first name) who is acting as Blair's lab assistant.  One of Sloane's literary techniques is to spend a lot of time describing everybody's looks and how they reflect the person's general personality and immediate emotions.  We hear a lot over the course of the book about how Walters carries herself regally and moves dexterously, even though she is fat.

Blair is said to be asleep after a long night of work, but Anne, now an attractive woman with "character" in her face, "strength in the spring of her jaw and the line of the cheekbone but not obstinacy..." is up and about.  Anne and Sayles talk about Blair, who is apparently obsessed with his current project, about which Anne has been told nothing, though she is sure it must have something to do with Helen; Blair, she reports, talks of Helen as if she is still alive: "He never mentioned her as if she were dead...you know, he'd say 'is' instead of 'was'...."  This makes us readers think that Blair has come up with a technique that enables him to talk to the dead, a development rife with exciting literary possibilities and philosophical ramifications! 

1955

When Blair finally comes downstairs Sayles is surprised to see how haggard and unkempt the man is.  When you read old books, you gain all sorts of little insights into the culture of the past, and The Edge of Running Water provides tidbits about late 1930s people's attitudes towards attire.  When Sayles is trying to get across that Blair is a total mess, has lost the sense of discipline and decorum he had when he was at university before Helen's untimely demise, one of the things he tells us that indicates the depths to which Blair has sunk is that the electrophysist isn't wearing a tie around his lab out here in the middle of nowhere!  More interesting to all you feminist readers, Anne is wearing pants, and Sayles and Elora Marcy (see below) gently chide her for doing so.

(I should note here that I cannot be 100% sure I am reading the 1939 text of The Edge of Running Water--different printings of the book show at least some textual variations, and I am not sure which printing this 2015 edition follows.  A variation I detected by chance: In the scan at the internet archive of a 1955 edition of The Edge of Running Water, Sayle's cab ride to Blair's place costs two dollars, while the text in the 2015 edition I read gives the price as only one dollar.  This difference, presumably an update to make the novel seem more current, jumped out at me, and I didn't take the time to look for other changes.)

As the text has been hinting, Blair for the last five years has been obsessively trying to figure out what happens to the human personality when a person dies, and building a machine with which to talk to the dead!  Awesome!  Sayles, back in civilization, has been doing research measuring the electrical impulses in the brain, and has brought paper tapes (like ticker tape) showing electroencephalographic readings, and Blair eagerly takes them to his lab, thinking they are the key to solving a problem he only alludes to, and doesn't let Sayles through the heavy metal door to the lab.  The only person Blair allows to accompany him into the lab is Walters, and Blair's descriptions of his device to Sayles and Anne are very vague.  The cleaning lady, Elora Marcy, a sweet woman popular in the town, tells Blair she is only permitted to sweep the lab once a week, and, when she does, all the apparatus is covered and Walters remains in the lab, watching her like a hawk.

Walters, we learn, is a medium, someone who believes she can contact the dead.  More importantly (because she doesn't perform any supernatural activities in this novel) she again and again demonstrates a cold manipulative competence--while Julian is out of it, old and weak and obsessed, and Sayles and Anne are confused and scared by everything that happens over the course of the novel and accomplish nothing, Walters is always in control of the situation.  Sayles/Sloane puts a gendered spin on this, Sayles remarking that he feels humiliated by how it is a woman who keeps her head and takes charge during crises instead of him.  The most important of these crises in which Walters takes charge comes midway through the novel, at the end of Sayles's first day in Maine, when Elora Marcy dies in a mysterious and complicated fashion that obliquely implicates Walters.

I like the illustration of Mrs. Walters,
the large medium, carrying off
Elora Marcy's body, but this alternate
title tries to trick you into thinking
there is communication with the dead
in the novel, of which there is none.  Zero!

To Walk the Night included a significant proportion of what I think of as detective fiction stuff--a mysterious death, suspects, clues, police detectives, etc.  And so does The Edge of Running Water--Sayles and Anne follow (what they assume to be) Marcy's footprints when she turns up dead, for example.  The local sheriff and the sheriff's sister come to Blair's decrepit mansion to investigate the death of the cleaning lady, which strikes fear into Sayles and Walters--the locals are already suspicious and resentful of Blair and Walters, and even Anne and Sayles, and now they have reason to believe they somehow killed the well-liked Marcy.  And what if this investigation exposes the fact that Blair is working on a project--talking to the dead--that even college-educated Sayles thinks is blasphemous and an indication that Blair is insane!

(The sheriff's sister is a clever educated woman who works as a secretary at Cambridge during the winter and does clerical work for her brother, like taking copious notes as the sheriff interrogates Sayles and Anne, and she seems to be doing a little sub rosa investigating on her own.  Both of the Sloane novels in The Rim of Morning feature intelligent women who pose some sort of threat to the novels' men.)

A number of chapters are devoted to a bit of court room drama, an inquest presided over by the county coroner at which a jury must rule if Marcy died by accident or if somebody is to blame and should be prosecuted.  The sheriff, the doctor who performed the autopsy on the cleaning woman, and our four outsiders--Blair the mad scientist, Walters the medium, Sayles the psychology prof, and Anne the love interest (one of the novel's concurrent subplots is Anne and Sayles falling in love in the middle of these three days of weirdness)--all have to sit on the stand and testify.  The agitated townspeople all want to hold the four city folk responsible, but the jury doesn't think there is enough evidence to do so, though they encourage further investigation into Marcy's mysterious death--the kind of thorough investigation that will expose Blair's experiments, which prods the electrophysicist to rush completion of his machine.

In the last 50 pages or so of the book everything comes to a head.  Anne and Sayles declare their love for each other and have their big make out scene.  Blair turns his back on Walters--he needed her in the early stages of his research into how to contact the dead, but he doesn't need her anymore, and now that the project is almost complete, they are at loggerheads--he wants to share the secret of communication with the other side with the world for free, while she wants to keep it a trade secret and charge a fee to those who wish to talk to the dead.  I thought this dispute a little prosaic.  Sayles figures out how Marcy died--Walters killed her accidentally and then disposed of the body and set up a bunch of false clues in order to protect from discovery Blair's precious machine.

Oh yes, the machine--Blair finally shows his device to Sayles and demonstrates its current capabilities.  This scene, for which we readers had been waiting for 200 pages, is quite disappointing.  Because Blair based his machine on seances--working with Walters, he discovered that the electrical impulses of multiple human nervous systems working in concert are what allow contact with the dead--his machine looks like a black table about which sit seven statues of twisted and gleaming copper wire, each connected to its two neighbors, the way people at a seance hold hands.  (The cover of a 1962 French edition of the novel illustrates this straightforwardly.)  This is just silly.  Even worse, the machine is not even close to finished, and in no possible way can it communicate with the dead--there is no communication with the dead in this book!  None at all!  Zero!  When Blair pulls the lever, a sort of black hole appears above the machine, and as he shifts the lever further, the black radiance, a portal to some other dimension, grows in size and power, sucking into it Earth air and dust and even pieces of paper from Blair's desk.  After 200 pages of detective boilerplate and the small-mindedness of small-town people and a guy's romance with a girl twelve or thirteen years younger than he, this is the payoff?  A portal to an unknown dimension?  That is the kind of thing that belongs on page 3 of a 30-page adventure story, not page 200 of a 240-page not-very-adventurous story!  Bummer!

When the black hole threatens to suck Blair and Sayles into that other dimension, Sayles throws the lever back into the off position.  Sayles tries to keep Blair from activating the machine again by seizing the key to the steel door to the lab, and tries to keep Walters under control by blackmailing her, but he fails on both counts.  Blair hits Sayles on the head with a flashlight, retrieves his key, activates the device, and is sucked out into another dimension--the sucking destroys the house and the machine.  Walters goes to the townspeople and tries to frame the other three for the crimes she committed trying to cover up the truth of Marcy's death, and when this doesn't work she jumps into the river; her body is never found, and having been told repeatedly that she is a strong swimmer with an indomitable will, we wonder if maybe she is still alive out there, trying to find another scientist to build another machine with which to contact the other side.  (I hope she is--The Edge of Running Water is one of those genre fiction stories in which the ambitious proactive villain is more interesting than the boring static protagonist.)

The detective stuff, the people-in-small-towns-are-narrow-minded jerks stuff, and the I'm-a-33-year-old-man-starting-a-sexual-relationship-with-a-20-year-old-woman-I-knew-when-she-was-eleven stuff is competent, but no more than competent.  I'm not sure why Anne is even in the story, except to provide a happy ending (which of course serves to undercut the story's success as a horror story.)  The mad scientist stuff, which is why I wanted to read the book in the first place, is disappointing.  Sloane doesn't give us the pulpy thrills of talking with the dead or communicating with or traveling to another dimension, and he doesn't do the philosophical/speculative fiction thing of suggesting what proof of life after death would do to the psychology of the individual or to our society as a whole, much less what effect the ability to talk to the dead would have on people.  Blair's machine is just a MacGuffin--Sloane could have written the same novel about a drug addict or a pornographer or a communist activist--smart crazy guy under the influence of a manipulative weirdo goes to a small town and does risky shit he probably shouldn't be doing and his estranged friend comes over to confront the weirdo, stage an intervention, and keep the suspicious locals off their backs and it all ends in tragedy...oh yeah, except the friend gets his dream girl.  Despite what it says on the cover of this 2015 edition, The Edge of Running Water is not a "tale of cosmic horror," but a tepid mystery story (as the 1956 Dell paperback with an alternate title suggests.)

I think I have to give The Edge of Running Water a marginal thumbs down.  Too bad.

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After this novel-length letdown, the MPorcius Fiction Log staff are demanding a return to short stories for the next few blog posts.