Don't Fear the Reaper

Stephen Graham Jones

There’s nothing quite like the thrill of a first encounter with the work of an exceptional writer. That sense of anticipation you feel as you work your way through the first few chapters, that willingness—especially if the book lives up to the hype—to submerge yourself in the fictional world of the story and be caught up in its intricacies, is surely one of the most worthwhile pleasures to be derived from reading fiction. Who wouldn’t give a little blood, sweat or tears to relive the experience of reading The Wasp Factory or American Psycho or Salem’s Lot for the first time? Just imagine coming innocently to Titus Groan and reading those lines that hint at the brooding sense of confinement and claustrophobia, and the almost inevitable, treacherous revolt it provokes:

Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by

itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were

it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that

swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls.

Or reading for the first time the opening pages of American Psycho and experiencing the frisson that comes from seeing these words writ there:

Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here is scrawled in blood red lettering

on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First …

and having the rug pulled from under your feet in the comically mundane descriptions of wealth and privilege set against the visceral sense of disgust evoked at the savage, insane violence that follows.

Reading Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians last year, was such an experience. Which makes it all the more frustrating that Don’t Fear the Reaper is such a disappointment. In Jones’ defence I have to cite my own culpability in not knowing beforehand that, although it purports to be a stand-alone novel, it is in fact the second in a mooted trilogy, following My Heart is a Chainsaw (2021). Perhaps if I had read the latter before coming to the new novel, I might have got more out of it, but in truth the events of the first book—the events that shaped Jade/Jennifer Daniels, the principal protagonist—are repeatedly referred to, summarised and debated through a variety of narrative means, such that one is able, at least to a limited extent, to feel some familiarity with the town of Proofrock, Idaho and its dark, bloody history.

Apart from characters’ memories and conversations about what, by the time of Don’t Fear the Reaper, has become known as the Independence Day Massacre, the main source of our knowledge about those events comes in the form of essay extracts written by one of the teenage survivors of the original slaughter. It’s not immediately clear who is speaking in these sections, but there are enough clues seeded throughout the essay and the main narrative, to reveal the author’s identity. I can only assume those familiar with the first book, would have guessed the identity of the essay’s author much earlier.

Reaper is set four years on from the events of the first book, and essentially it charts Jennifer’s struggle—aided and abetted by various friends and allies—to stop the murderous rampage by a notorious serial killer known as Dark Mill South. He, like Jennifer herself, is a native American, newly escaped from his prison transport whilst en route to show officials where the bodies of some of his previous victims are buried. At the beginning, Jennifer too is fresh out of custody, having served time for the destruction of federal property during the course of the 2015 July 4th killings. We learn that she was herself held as a suspect in those killings, before the testimony of others helped establish her innocence. Chief among her allies in the conflict with Dark Mill South, is Letha Mondragon. Letha, it turns out, was the young female designated by Jade in Chainsaw, as the most likely candidate for ‘Final Girl’ status, which is to say she was the one who most closely matched the characteristics—young, pretty, virginal, smart and resourceful—possessed by the heroine of the archetypal slasher movies. Think Laurie (Jamie Leigh Curtis) in Halloween, or Alice (Adrienne King) in Friday the 13th. In the course of Reaper, it becomes apparent that in the earlier book, Jennifer used her obsessive knowledge of slasher movies and the behaviour patterns of killers and victims, to enlist and coach Letha into helping her defeat the perpetrator of the Independence Day Massacre.

The story begins with a bang—the opening chapter is titled ‘Motel Hell’, and subsequent chapters are all named after key genre movies—with a violent set-piece straight out of the slasher bag of tricks, in which a horny teenager is lured to his death with the promise of sex. It continues pretty much in the same vein, with Jones upping the stakes—in terms of blood and gore—with each new act of mayhem and slaughter. Of course this continuous ramping up of depictions of violence runs the risk of diffusing the narrative’s elemental power, of negating its ability to shock or unsettle, and even of descending into parody. Given the extent to which the novel plays with slasher tropes, this may be intentional, but in any case, Jones’ bravura handling of these set-pieces, the inventiveness with which Dark Mill South dispatches his victims, leavened with the blackly comic tone—one victim, “trying to hold his brains in with his right hand”, while trying to escape the killer, attempts to parkour his way down through a bank of gym seats, realising the suicidal nature of his actions, regrets that “there’s not even anybody here with a phone to record this”—helps to sustain the tension and keep us interested.

Jones handles the complex relationships between the central characters with acuity and invests them with a convincing emotional depth, particularly that between Jennifer and Letha, two young women with history together and a shared baggage carried over from Chainsaw. Maybe it’s a stretch but in naming the town Proofrock (surely not an incidental decision) Jones might be alluding to Eliot’s 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,' as a way to foreground Jennifer’s role as mentor to Letha, perceiving herself as “an attendant lord, one that will do / to swell a progress, start a scene or two / advise the prince.” Indeed, the allusion is reinforced by the lines that follow a little later in the poem, “At times, indeed, almost ridiculous — Almost, at times, the Fool,” words that might well have come from the inhabitants of Proofrock, to describe their attitude to the eccentric, slasher obsessed Jade Daniels. Retired sheriff Hardy has also acted as something of a mentor to her, and together with Letha and her husband, Deputy Banner Tompkins, they serve as a surrogate family for Jennifer, providing her with the love and emotional stability that have been absent from her relationship with her birth parents.

Where the novel loses its grip is in Jones’ decision to opt for a shifting, multi-perspective narrative, rather than, as in Chainsaw, keeping the focus on Jennifer. The transitions are abrupt and come not just between but within chapters. After the murders in the opening ‘Motel Hell’ section, we’re straight into the first extract from Gal Pangborne’s thesis, and from there into ‘Scream’, wherein the perspective moves from Jennifer, to Hardy (a crucial ally), to Deputy Tompkins (at first portrayed as an almost cartoonish bumpkin plagued by self-doubt, but later shown to be more resourceful and courageous than suspected), to Cinnamon Baker, a potential victim with her own secrets to hide. This is where, without having read Chainsaw, things become confusing. There’s an assumed familiarity with these characters’ histories and their relationship to each other, and though one can, through inference and guesswork, pick out some of these connective threads, there’s little engagement or pleasure to be derived from all this detective work. As more and more characters are introduced, most of them having played some part or other in the events of 2015, the narrative begins to lose momentum, its focus becoming ever more diffuse. That some of these characters—Cinnamon and her sister Ginger, new history teacher Claude Armitage, Jennifer’s father Tab Daniels and his friend Rexall—are implicated in either or both the crimes of the past and the present, confuses things, makes it harder for us to know who to root for and who to be wary of.

Perversely, of all the shifting narrative perspectives, outside of Jennifer or Letha, one of the few that actually works—in terms of having a distinctive voice—is when Jones makes Dark Mill South the focal character. The voice is reflective, sardonic even, as when, after thinking about the correct height to hang victims’ bodies from trees in order to warn off the townspeople who might discover where he’s hiding out, concludes that it “Doesn’t matter” since “there’s not going to be enough of them to hang on a tree anyway.” At times his deadpan tone is macabrely comic, as when he gives us a matter of fact description of witnessing some hunters making precise cuts in a deer they’ve just killed, and then tie one end of the animal to the tow-bar of their truck, and the other to a tree. When the truck moves forward, Dark Mill South watches in fascination as the deer’s skin is “Peeled right off the same way as a magician pulls a tablecloth out from under all the candlesticks.” When the hunters had cheered, he had cheered too, and filed the process away in his mind for future use. Chasing after Letha and Jennifer, he gleefully concocts a scenario in which he can do the same to them, only he’ll improve on the original by leaving “the animal alive when you do it.”

Unfortunately, when the focus is on other characters, like Armitage—who shares Jennifer’s fascination with and knowledge of the minutiae of slasher lore, and whose own motives are at odds with hers—or Cinnamon or Ginger Baker, or any of those destined to become Dark Mill South’s victims, interest wanes. The further into the novel one gets, the more the victims become interchangeable, functioning only to keep the action, and the increasingly convoluted plot, moving along. Without prior knowledge of their precise roles in the events of July 4, 2015, and with little motivation for finding out, there’s no reward for an emotional investment in their fate. In truth, the appeal of Don’t Fear the Reaper depends on the extent to which readers are taken with the slasher phenomenon. If the answer is ‘not so much,’ then perhaps this one is not for you.