Imagine if Nathaniel Hawthorne was interesting, engaging, intriguing and even funny - that is what Robert McCammon has become. It's almost as if he got sick of being called, "the Southern Stephen King" donned a tricorn hat and disappeared into Colonial Williamsburg, never to return. Until, of course, he wrote this killer novel....



I admit, Speaks the Nightbird was not the easiest book to get into. McCammon has always had a knack for describing things and he lays it on thick during the first three chapters. My eyes glossed over more than one overly long paragraph whose sole purpose was to describe what people were wearing. But once his characters, Magistrate Woodward and his clerk Matthew Corbett, get to Fount Royal and begin conducting the witch trial that they've been summoned to hold the book takes off like a mare shorn free of its plow tethers (as the characters in the book would be likely to say, providing they were played by John Hodgeman).



It's a mystery, and not a bad one too boot - especially since the story takes place not long after the Salem Witch trials and not in any of the typical settings which mysteries are known to inhabit. But that's not the reason to read the book. What I enjoyed most about it was just the grand and intricately detailed view it gives us of Colonial America. Normally period pieces of this time are as bright and untarnished as a collection of dutch porcelain dolls. Nothing could be further from the truth in Nightbird. This place makes the world of Ichabod Crane seem like a Disney flick (oh, wait a minute...). Font Royal is dark and dreary and ruled by fear, paranoia and superstition. Everything, absolutely everything about it is twisted and backwards, and yet not without some sympathy for the strange situation the colonists and their neighbors have found themselves in. More than once I wondered if I too would be chanting burn the witch had I lived there at the time.



Back in the late 1980's, during the rise of splat-punk, McCammon left the world of horror in disgust. Given what it was I can't blame him, and seeing what it has become through the rise torture porn in the cinema - I am sure he dreads ever being associated with it. But. The pumpkin never rolls far from its vine and this book is not for the faint of heart. Three nights in a row it kept me up until 3:30 in the morning with its spiraling spiel. Yet McCammon knows something which keeps him from disappearing into that charnal pit of entertainment which seems content with nothing more than endless graphic dismemberment - good horror is about contrast and justice. There needs to be a balance between light and dark, hope and despair, and it needs to all happen at just the right pace. Which is just what Nightbird delivers. When I finished the book, it left me feeling pretty good about the world and only sad it had to end. Guess it's on to the next in the series....



Speaks the Nightbird is a mystery. It's not horror - I swear on my finest collection of voodoo dolls. Whatever it is, it's a damn good read, check it out some time.