What now? What did the forces want her to do next? Leave the house, try to get away in the darkness? No. The murderer was out there, watching, waiting; he would see her if she tried to leave, and she couldn't outrun a man through the snow. Hide? No. There wasn't anywhere to hide that she wouldn't be found.
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| 1981 paperback edition |
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Sad to say, I am pretty down on Night Screams. We look into a book like this for sex and violence and fear, first and foremost, and very few of the pages actually feature murders, fights, or titillating sex, or actually generate any emotion in the reader. There are a lot of characters, and none are particularly interesting or likable, I guess so that we don't feel bad when they are killed or revealed to be the killer. The characters also don't act in a fashion that feels very believable; they are cartoonish, but unfortunately not funny.
As for the plot, it is normal slasher/giallo/Ten Little You Know Whats stuff--we have a bunch of characters who are getting killed one by one and the detective has to figure out which character is the killer while he enjoys a romance with the most attractive and most normal of the cast of suspects/potential victims. Many scenes feel like dead ends as the characters try one method or another to gather info and come up empty. I find these ultimately sterile scenes annoying, but I guess such scenes are the norm for detective fiction.
So, thumbs down for Night Screams, even if Robert Bloch [claims to have] liked it. Despite my serious misgivings, the novel was reprinted in paperback in 1981, by our French friends in 1989, and here in America in 2011--hilariously, the woman on the almost indecipherable cover of the 2011 edition (is that a hand or a snowdrift in the lower half of the cover?) seems to have facial piercings.
Obviously I am going to blame Pronzini for the weakness of this novel, not my spirit animal Barry N. Malzberg, even though my academic experience has taught me to expect that the second, third or fourth author of a publication probably did more actual work on the text than the top name on the list. After all, Night Screams is structured and presented as a mainstream detective story with a bunch of suspects and victims and a detective who bangs the top suspect slash potential victim, plus a lot of mainstream pseudo literary gunk in which people look out at the snow; Night Screams does not feel like a science fiction novel or like the typical Malzberg novel which is a series of surreal events that may or may not be the delusions of a madman who is either an astronaut or has some mundane life, spiced up with crazy jokes that reflect the narrator's or the protagonist's insanity. But we can see Malzbergian elements in Night Screams. Malzberg protagonists are often self-deluded and/or monomaniacal to the point of insanity, and one of the story's characters, Neal, kind of fits that bill. Malzbergian protagonists also generally suffer sexual dysfunction, and while our main characters, Brad the FBI man and Leslie the psychic landscape painter, are sexual athletes who are marvelously sexually compatible (on their first date, Brad has two orgasms and is able to maintain his erection between orgasms without having to take any time to recover, while Leslie has three orgasms and tells Brad he can pound her as hard as he likes), the second rank characters and the minor characters all seem to have problems in the bedroom.
So, there is my sad verdict on, and my Malzberg-centric analysis of, Night Screams. If you want a plot summary and some additional evidence that back up the various claims I make above about why Night Screams is not very good, read on below. And remember, I am going to totally spoil the "absolutely stunning surprise ending."
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Part One also introduces Leslie Abbot, a woman landscape painter. She has a vision of the murder of the flutist that includes the sound of the screams and the stink of the feces. And another vision--of the murderer approaching her own house!
Part Two is the meat of Night Screams, like 240 pages.
Leslie the painter is a member of a little group of people with psychic powers. Recently they numbered seven, but today only five remain, as Sandra the flutist was one of their group, as well as a man killed a month earlier, Tony. Pronzini and Malzberg almost immediately reintroduce the theme of people being compelled to do things against their will, telling us Leslie often has the experience of doing things because "some random events or series of events seemed to be preordained by whatever forces controlled the universe." I don't like this theme--to me a good story is about people making decisions and succeeding or falling due to the nature and extent of their own personalities and abilities, not because of some decree of fate. I also don't like invocations of "the universe" and its decrees in modern writing--such ideas feel like a vague, toothless and bloodless substitute religion for people too educated and too hip to believe in Judaism or Christianity.
The founder and leader of the group of psykers, Oscar, an elderly widower who edits a trade journal for pet dealers (circulation: 10,000), calls a meeting of the five survivors in Vermont, where Leslie has been living for a few months in an old church converted into an artist's studio. Also among the psykers are skinny Jo from New York City, a chain-smoking theatrical agent who calls people "darling" and "dear;" overweight failed actress Gloria of upstate New York, where she manages a community playhouse; and Neal of Long Island, a married accountant who hopes to use his psychic powers to become an entertainer like his hero The Amazing Kreskin.
So here we have our core list of potential victims and likely suspects. Having established this crew of middle-class creatives with whom writers like Pronzini and Malzberg can identify, we get our intro to the agents of the state, beneficiaries of the people's taxes, who are going to end up dealing with the case of the murdered psychics, FBI men Brad Saxon and Stan Walker. Connecticut-based Walker is a passive by-the-book kind of guy, whom DC-based field agent Brad, the younger but senior agent, a hip urbanite who complains about Hoover, fears the Bureau is fascistic, and wears his hair long, finds annoying. Brad believes in the ability of psychic powers to help solve crimes, and is eager to meet the assembled psykers. As all my readers who are attorneys know, the FBI doesn't get involved in the murders of psychic flutists unless the penumbra of their psychic emanations affects interstate commerce; Brad and Stan's real mission is investigating the disappearance from DC of Morris Evers, Atomic Energy Commission administrator--Sandra was his cousin, bringing her murder into the bailiwick of the FBI men.
Having set their tale in New England in January, Pronzini and Malzberg inflict on us plenty of descriptions of snow and ice and slush, many scenes of people looking out the window at the snow and scenes of people putting on and taking off their mufflers and coats and bitching about the weather. I guess this is supposed to add atmosphere, make things feel more oppressive, more dangerous, but these scenes sort of make the eyes glaze over. Somewhat more successful at making the reader uneasy and generating suspense is how P & M portray New Englanders as superstitious types who think that psychic powers are witchcraft. "The old Puritan beliefs died hard up here, if they ever died at all." The local people all fear and hate the psykers, so we can add them to the list of suspects, I suppose. Somebody, presumably one of the villagers, regularly makes threatening calls to Leslie, saying stuff like "We don't want your kind here." I guess P & M are trying to win for the psychics some of the sympathy readers would feel for Jews or blacks under threat from bigots, as well as stoke the contempt for rural people felt by the city folk whom P & M assume make up their audience (Brad considers the little village where Leslie lives to have "an aura of emptiness and provincial and cultural isolation...[to be] a place on the edge of nowhere.")
Brad and Walker come to the meeting Oscar has organized and ask questions of the assembled psykers. (The word the characters use is "clairvoyants.") All of the clairvoyants act like weirdos or jerks with the exception of Leslie the painter. Leslie is also the prettiest of the women and Brad immediately develops a crush on her. So, it is Leslie whom Brad enlists to use her psychic powers to help the investigation. The next day Brad and Leslie go to Sandra the flutist's place to see if Leslie can get any psychic insight into what happened to Sandra. Leslie has such powerful visions that she almost collapses, but these visions don't add much to the visions she had when the murders took place. This book is full of people with psychic powers, but these powers don't actually accomplish much until the last 20% or so of the novel. That evening the painter and FBI agent have a date at Leslie's house, and share their love of jazz (holy crap, P & M really are aiming to please the Playboy audience with this book) and then go to bed together, where they have the best sex of their lives--after another of the menacing calls from the anti-psychic harasser comes through, of course.
Brad brings Leslie to the site of Gloria's murder, but, as usual, her powers don't turn up any useful info. The next actual bit of excitement is Leslie finding her house vandalized, all her paintings destroyed--except the painting inspired by her vision of the killer approaching her home! Dun--dun--Dunnnn.
Brad and Walker get the news that Evers has been found--he was killed by his homosexual lover. Now there is no reason for the FBI to be involved in the murders of the three clairvoyants. (Why did P & M make their protagonist an FBI man, anyway? So he would be a city slicker that Playboy staff and readers could identify with in the way they would not identify with a county sheriff or state trooper?) Of course Brad wants to stay on the case, and luckily a blizzard rolls in and the FBI men are stuck in Leslie's psyker-hating burg. At the novel's halfway point, Brad assembles all 20-odd citizens of the village at the inn to interrogate them, hoping to figure out who has been telephoning and now breaking, entering and vandalizing Leslie's home. This allows P & M to present to us for comic relief some starry eyed ex-hippies turned Jesus freaks who say stuff like "Praise Jesus" and suggest the psychics are possessed by the devil. Of course, no clues emerge from the interrogations. Leslie does not attend this event, even though she wants to, because "The controlling forces again, the sense of inevitability: She was here because she was supposed to be here." Night Screams is the kind of book in which people who believe in Christ are portrayed as idiots but people who believe in psychic powers and do things because abstract ill-defined "forces" make them are considered eminently sensible.
Neal sneaks away from the big village get-together organized by the FBI because he had a vision of himself in the basement of the local antique store--the alcoholic antiques dealer is one of the most vociferous anti-psychics, a prime suspect in the harassment campaign against Leslie and, according to Neal, a prime suspect in the slayings of the clairvoyants. Neal has been portrayed as a comic relief nerd loser, but he doesn't just break into the antique store because he is foolish--he has to do what he saw in the vision. "You couldn't deny a precognition; you could get into trouble that way, trying to change what you were destined to do." What is the point of psychic powers if they don't help you make decisions, to avoid trouble? Why are the psychic powers even in this story?--I swear the plot would work just the same if they were left out, just have the villagers fear "city folk" instead of "clairvoyants."
The trip to the antiques store leads to a scene, maybe supposed to be funny, of Neal and the alcoholic antiques dealer almost coming to blows and Brad stumbling upon their confrontation and calming them down by "rocking" his revolver, which I guess is a typo for "cocking." I hope it's not a typo for "racking." Neal's psychic vision and the whole antique store sequence, which is pretty lengthy and includes Brad doing a top to bottom search of the antique store, contribute nothing to the plot.
Oscar has a vision of his own and runs out into the snow. Jo follows him, only to be ambushed and murdered. Leslie also has a vision that leads her and Brad to where Jo hangs from a noose, dead, under a covered bridge (like on the book jacket)--Oscar is still there, in a daze, too out of his wits to offer any clues. Again we get the idea that Oscar may be to blame. Is this just P & M trying to fool us? Or is Oscar under the control of some other psyker, the real villain who is using Oscar merely as a tool?
After banging Leslie, Brad goes downstairs to get a sandwich and sees a figure outside. Is it Neal? Oscar? Who knows? Brad goes out into the snow to chase this mysterious character and we hear a lot about how cold it is--I thought the line "The wind-chill factor had already begun to suck body heat from him" was pretty funny, though maybe because I am the kind of person who is skeptical of "wind chill factor" and "heat index" and "real feel temp." The mystery man ambushes Brad and knocks our hero out with some firewood.
This leaves Leslie to deal with the killer alone. Both Leslie and the killer select weapons and tactics and strategies based on what their visions and what "the forces" permit them--they are both puppets on strings rather than agents who determine their own goals and how to pursue them, and then succeed or fail based on their decisions and abilities. Totally lame storytelling, though I guess in keeping with Malzberg's pessimistic view of life.
The fight between Leslie and the killer is not bad, but the revelation of who the killer is is total garbage that made angry. The person who has been killing all the psychics is a minor character I had been paying no attention to, the innkeeper's overweight wife. (I guess we are supposed to believe her fat body looks like a man's in the distance, like when Walker chased her and when Brad saw her through the window while making a little postcoital snackerino.) Why would a fat woman who runs an inn with her husband kill psykers? Because she is possessed by the ghost of her dead brother, a character never mentioned in the story until page 245 of a novel the last numbered page of which is page 262. (Maybe we are supposed to think this possession by a man gives the innkeeper's wife a masculine gait and masculine strength, at least when in kill mode, making it more believable that she can pass for a man and so successfully fight people and run away from people and lift dead bodies above her head so she can hang them from nooses.)
When she was thirteen, the innkeeper's future wife and her eight-year-old brother were playing cowboys and Indians (maybe you say "Native Americans") and she tied up her brother with a blue velvet cord and accidentally strangled him. To make the tragic accident look like suicide, she strung her brother up with a noose. A few years later, the brother's ghost came to inhabit his sister's body. (This is all kind of reminding me of the Genesis masterpiece, "The Musical Box.") Dead brother prefers living, even if he has to share a woman's body, to being dead, so when Leslie came to town, and other psykers followed, he decided to kill them because he feared they would detect his presence and send him back to the afterlife.
Neal's psychic powers guide him to the unconscious Brad, whom he arouses--Neal is the only psyker in this book whose powers ever seem to actually produce. Leslie is losing the fight and is about to die when Brad rescues her. Instead of surrendering to Brad the ghost decides to direct his sister's body to jump out a high window--the final fight sequence takes place in the belfry; you remember Leslie's house is an old church, don't you--to their deaths.
Part Three, three pages of text, lets us know that Brad and Leslie live happily ever after in a city apartment, that Oscar recovers his wits, and offers a joke scene in which Neal is a guest on a TV talk show where he has a vision of the host and a guest having oral sex backstage. We never learn any more about the "forces," or Brad's or Neal's or the innkeeper's reaction to learning that a ghost was forcing the innkeeper's wife to massacre people or what happens to the alcoholic dealer of bogus antiques. What a load of crap.
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