Horror and History: Christopher Buehlman's Those Across the River

I was about to write that if William Faulkner ever wrote a horror novel, it would be very similar to Those Across the River… then I remember that Faulner did write horror novels, of sorts: Sanctuary certainly qualifies, as potentially does Absolam, Absolam. So perhaps easy, pretentious comparisons aren't fair to Buehlman, who has written a Southern Gothic of tremendous quality and originality.

The book's narrator, a WWI veteran haunted by his experiences in the trenches, has inherited a plantation estate in rural Georgia in 1935. A former history professor who found himself unemployed and unemployable in his field after an adulterous affair with the wife of a colleague, Frank Nichols moves in with the idea of writing a history of his ancestor who owned the plantation, a murderous slave holder so vile that he refused to free his slaves after the Civil War and was killed by them in retaliation. But writing this history requires him to journey to the plantain ruins, located in a dark stretch of woods across the river… a journey he is advised not to take by the town folk who offer a monthly ritual sacrifice of livestock to whoever--or whatever--lives there.

Nichols finds himself in a hellish version of Benedetto Croce's famous claim that all history is contemporary history as his compulsion to uncover the truth about his nefarious ancestor merges with his drive to work through his own inner darkness. The past is very much alive in this novel... and it has teeth.
I hemmed and hawed about whether to write about what lies across the river, as the book has no true twist, but rather gradually builds to the answer to the mystery, and the more well-versed in classic monster lore the reader is, the quicker she or he will figure out what lies in wait there.

I really can't convey how fully engaged I was while reading this book, having just read a string of so-so horror novels that muted my palate. Reading Buehlman's novel was like eating a delicious hot and spicy curry after dining on nothing but gruel for a month. His prose is exquisite, his character development astounding, and his ability to convey a perfect sense of time and place is to be envied.

Perhaps what most impressed me about this book is the vivid representation of a small Georgia town in the Great Depression, small details in characterization and landscape that bring the book whole and breathing to life. This is no simple pulp horror tale… it is a work of profound insight into the nature of trauma, the hold the land has on those who make their living off of it, and the power of history to haunt the present in powerful and tragic ways. Above all, it is a story of duty and relationship. The final lines of this wonderful novel have haunted me more than any in recent memory. I just can't recommend this book highly enough, so read it!