This is a novel that does not fit exactly into the horror genre or a straight noir (or it seems any other), it reads like a gonzo cross between television's Twin Peaks and Anderson's WINESBERG, OHIO. As one might imagine, when Helen Hummer finally runs afoul of Arthur Moore, the resulting climax scene is straight out of a Jim Thompson novel. Collier's characters are definitely comedic rustics, but much of the book's dry humor is rooted in cruelty and rampant misogyny. Arthur Moore, a farmer who sees women as nothing more than "living latrines," raises a brood of rattlesnakes in secret and dispatches them to kill neighbors whom he finds offensive. Helen Hummer, a middle-aged virgin spinster who hates men, adopts a male infant from an orphanage, names him Henrietta, and raises him as a girl, beating him so severely that the child grows into an idiot youth whose only friend is a tree. Other aspects of the book however, are genuinely jarring in the context of Collier's relaxed prose style and overall light-touch.
The chapter titles themselves highlight the book's lurid content, such as "A Man's Best Friend is His Whiskey Glass," "A Secret Sexual Pleasure," "Arthur Moore Improves on Beating One's Wife," and "Alice's Secret for Fondling." The book is oddly humorous at times, and to be sure, some of the narrative situations are about as sophisticated as a typical shaggy dog story. The primary occupations of the farmers and their wives are drinking and having illicit sex. Written in carefully crafted, matter-of-fact prose, Collier's novel is account of everyday life in the isolated rural community of Menham. While not a horror novel per se, Collier's first novel is a bizarre, grotesque account of small-town life, calling it strange book is an understatement. v-vii 1-248, original greenish-gray cloth, front and spine stamped in black, fore-edge untrimmed.
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