SUMMER FICTION

---

STILL LIFE WITH CROWS AUTHORS: DOUGLAS PRESTON AND LINCOLN CHILD WARNER BOOKS HARDCOVER @ $36.95 CAN. REVIEW BY ALEX GRANT.

A rip-roaring American Gothic horror novel set deep in the scalding corn-belt of Kansas STILL LIFE WITH CROWS is totally absurd and derivative – an amalgam of X-Files and Stephen King featuring an other-worldly FBI agent with exquisite taste in clothes and food and all the appurtenances of the super-rich.

This mystery man is actually on vacation and is a very smooth operator who can relate to the hayseeds and the rednecks in this very remote corner of know-nothing nowhere- Medicine Creek notorious for a massacre in 1865; August 14th to be precise when a band of Cheyenne warriors slew a bloodthirsty gang of forty-five white vigilantes. The site was 'The Mounds' a legendary haunted set of hillocks strewn with relics from the Indian Wars scratched over by modern day tomb raiders.

Agent Pendergast locks horns with local sheriff Dent Hazen, a wily curmudgeon desperate to put an end to a sudden splurge of grotesque, ghastly murders within the serried ranks of seven-foot high corn. The heat is a living threatening presence at all times, and a macabre turkey abattoir is a central site for bloody mayhem – after hours.

The authors are expert at setting the scene for each episode of suspense and gore. Both the good guys and the bad guys get the chop from a subhuman monster with superhuman strength who lives deep down in Kraus’s Kaverns, a catch-penny but impressive tourist trap that conceals a deep dark secret.

Preston and Child are also men with a no-nonsense approach to this splatter genre, always delivering more and more gore and always keeping the interplay of character at a high boil. Medicine Creek is a community rapidly going to hell in a hand-basket, through no fault of its harmless devoted denizens – with one exception – thanks to the major agri-business corporations who would now. after driving the small farmers off their land,like to experiment with genetically altered crops to produce better gasohol from the local corn. Much of the drama centers upon rivalry with the nearby township of Deeper for the Kansas State University to look kindly upon Medicine Creek as the chosen site for more rash meddling with Mother Nature.

STILL LIFE WITH CROWS should not work as impressively as it does since the bare-bones of the story are utterly familiar and foreseeable from page one yet clearly the authors believed wholly in their tallest of tales, chose to root it in actual history, and in a pungently imagined locale, and brought the entire crazy-quilt of influences to completion with brazen self-confidence and know-how.

© Alex Grant June 2003
alexgrantreviews@hotmail.com

More Reviews

Home

© Hackwriters 2000-2003 all rights reserved