FICTION
‘Little Sister Death’
William Gay
Dzanc Books
$26.95, 216 pages
Let’s say you’re a writer, down on your luck, and your agent suggests you write a moneymaker, a potboiler. Why not a horror novel? And while you’re at it, you can use that fascinating poltergeist incident dating back to the early 1800s in your home state of Tennessee.
To research it, you visit the original site of the haunting, where you sense that the house is "profoundly malefic" and seems to stare back at you with "death in its eyes." Do you then relocate yourself, pregnant wife and small child to that house? Of course not. That would be asking for it, or, as the locals tell you, Letting it in. That would be … madness.
Welcome to “Little Sister Death,” the late William Gay’s gloriously creepy ghost story, based on the infamous Bell Witch legend, the most documented haunting in American history. Drawing from classics like “The Shining” and “The Haunting of Hill House,” “Little Sister Death” blends history and fiction in a multigenerational tale that probes the borders between reality and fantasy.
Discovered among his notebooks and papers after Gay’s death at 70 in 2012, the novel has been released by Dzanc Books with an introduction by Tom Franklin, one of the Hohenwald, Tenn., native’s close friends. In addition to sharing intimate biographical details about the shy and reclusive author — his favorite restaurant was Waffle House, he never drove, cut his own hair, and bathed in the creek behind his log cabin — Franklin’s essay clarifies that Gay was the model for his fictional counterpart, David Binder.
Gay, who spent most of his adult life working construction, was 58 when his first novel, “The Long Home,” came out, immediately establishing his place on the literary Southern Gothic map, somewhere between Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner. Binder, like Gay, has skyrocketed from obscurity to unexpected acclaim with his first book, and it’s his experiences at the cursed house in 1982 that glue the novel together. Though the real Bell Witch hounded only one family out of their home, Gay splices together Binder’s tale with a series of ghostly visitations spanning 200 years.
The first, a gruesome, candlelit incident that takes place in 1785, suggests an incestuous interpretation of the title, and Gay wisely leaves much to the reader’s imagination rather than over-explain. This initial chapter incorporates several of the legend’s key elements: a wolfish black dog, a young girl with hair “the color of cornsilk” and a mutton-chopped “country squire.”
The second manifestation unfolds through the eyes of a sharecropper who occupied the Bell (in Binder’s story, changed to Beale) house with his wife and daughters in the 1930s. Gay’s unerring grasp of local idioms and his affinity for the era yields an Erskine Caldwell-meets-Poe portrait of a man driven to insanity by the scrabbling of rats in the walls, fetid odors, and a beckoning blonde succubus “with cold cat’s eyes.”
In the third, Gay fleshes out a more formal retelling of the official poltergeist assault that drove the Beales out of their wits in 1817, with “hints of heinous deeds” in Beale’s past and the spirit’s bawdy repartee with her audience, “a perverse source of entertainment that drew them gapejawed and slackmouthed out of the brush as sugar draws flies.”
In Binder’s sections, parallels to Jack Torrance’s hellish breakdown in “The Shining” are frequent and obvious: Writing can be hell, bordering on insanity. Who wouldn’t want to hack someone up as a deadline approaches? With the house gaining on him, Binder’s suspicions and paranoia reinforce the fraught process of a writer’s isolation, the potential obsession resulting from “that deep and nameless affinity for the questions that did not have any answers.”
Like Torrance, Binder meets the underbelly of his psyche in the resident evil — lurking copperheads “as big as his forearm,” the louche sexuality of his brother-in-law, a growing appetite for violence that leaves his family in the direct path of harm. The instability of his wife, grieving her father’s death, and 5-year-old daughter, her imagination as runaway as her father’s, deepen the cracks between reason and the fallout from emotional overload.
Gay charges the atmosphere with shimmering unpredictability and the timelessness of fairy tales, with everything you don’t want to find in your house after dark: knocking inside the walls, disembodied singing and giggling, a terrifying change to the Winnie the Pooh cartoons Binder’s daughter watches: “It could work the TV now.”
From every direction, the rural landscape bewitches and beckons in passages that show Gay at the top of his form: “Distant lightning flickered there, vague and threatless, and [Binder] caught himself waiting for thunder that wouldn’t come. Orange electricity bloomed and faded, burnishing the silver clouds, tracing their outlines with bright neon fire, the afterimage burning on his retinas. Beyond the tool shed the sky was black and wet looking, velvet drowning slowly in India ink.”
Though Gay hints at the gathering force of the contemporary haunting, Binder’s story ends in what feels like the middle of a suspenseful but relatively bloodless version of the Beale Witch’s 20th-century incarnation. Given Gay’s body of work (two novels, “Provinces of Night” and “Twilight,” and two short story collections), a longer treatment might have been planned.
Then, just as your heart has slowed down, comes the epilogue in which Gay recalls the night he and his uncle visited the Bell site, after which his uncle complained of “hearing things, seeing things.” Gay, persuaded to sleep in his uncle’s bedroom to prove he’s not crazy, hears just enough for us to exit “Little Sister Death” hoping nothing has followed us home.
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