When I was a kid, I used to marvel at my grandfather’s stories. Although he terrified me – he had piercing ice blue eyes, looked like Charles Bronson and was a master welder with hands that, I thought, could effortlessly crumble blocks of concrete – I hung on his every word like he was some kind of white-haired prophet. His anecdotes of living through the Great Depression, specifically, were chilling back then – and even more chilling now that I can fully understand the terror he must have experienced when his beloved wife and newborn son both died in childbirth and he suddenly found himself a grieving, middle-aged widower with three motherless daughters.
It’s not certain how many dispossessed Americans died as a result of the Great Depression – either from starvation, suicide, murder, despair, etc. – but estimates are in the millions. John Steinbeck’s 1939 classic The Grapes of Wrath clearly describes America’s southern Great Plains during that time: “And then the dispossessed were drawn west – from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Carloads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless – restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do – to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut – anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land.”
So it’s somehow fitting that Mr. Shivers, the debut novel from Robert Jackson Bennett – who was born in Baton Rouge and raised in Texas – is set in arguably one of the most horrific times in American history. A blend of literary fiction and mainstream horror, the story’s main character, Marcus Connelly, is a man consumed with vengeance. On the trail of a man who brutally murdered his daughter, Connelly has lost everything: his wife, his home, his future, and – just quite possibly – his sanity. Now, essentially a hobo riding the rails west in search of a mysterious scarred murderer, Connelly is shocked when he runs into a group of misfits on the same exact quest as himself – they’re all in search of a tall, horribly scarred man who pointlessly killed a loved one. But as the dirty, hungry, desperate group shares their heartrending stories around a fire in the middle of nowhere, they realize that their quarry may not be a man at all but some kind of dark god.
“He has a thousand names and each one catches but a part of him… He is the Harvester, the Sickle Man…the Night Walker and That Which Devours… Death is but a term. To say that he is Death is to call night a mere shadow. He bears a dread weapon in his hands, that thing we call nothing, and he brings it down as a blade. Cuts under all, plows it all up, turns it over. That is what he is.”
Traveling across a landscape of desolation and hopelessness, Connelly and his followers track the scarred man across the wasteland that is the heartland of America – but what they find at quest’s end is far from redemption…
Although some readers may find Mr. Shivers derivative – there are numerous similarities to King’s The Stand and Dark Tower saga – and somewhat formulaic, the brilliance of this novel can be found in the finer points of the narrative. Bennett’s subtle use of imagery throughout is powerfully poetic. The numerous uses of variations of the color red (dust, sunsets, blood on the railroad tracks, etc.), for example, were profound. And if readers consume Mr. Shivers on an allegorical level, they’ll not only be entertained but may very well glean some existential tidbits from the story as well.
“He was so small. A little man scrambling across the wilderness, trying to make the cosmos pay attention and make sense. In that midnight belly of the jail, dawn was a memory and the sun was no more than a dream, and hope tasted more of a curse to him than a blessing…”
