Who Goes There?

Every time I’ve encountered Charles L. Grant’s stuff I’ve been indifferent at best, which is a shame because he really did put in the work. From the ’70s until his untimely death (only a few days after his 54th birthday), Grant was a prolific practitioner of dark fantasy, spooky science fiction, and what he called “quiet” horror. Grant’s brand of horror doesn’t seek to gross out or even scare the reader in the conventional sense, but to invoke a certain uneasy atmosphere; this is one way of saying his stories can be very moody, in a way that for some reason does not appeal to me. Not to say he was a bad writer; he clearly exceled in his wheelhouse, just that I find said wheelhouse to be a case of style over substance. It says something that other than his Nebula-winning story “A Crowd of Shadows” I would say today’s story is my favorite from Grant, but I still didn’t care for it. Obviously some people did care, at least at the time: “Hear Me Now, My Sweet Abbey Rose” got a World Fantasy Award nomination. It’s also set in the perpetually haunted Connecticut town of Oxrun Station, a favorite fictional locale for Grant, although for some reason the folks at ISFDB have not yet added this story as an entry in that series despite it being explicitly set there.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March 1978 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted in The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series VII (ed. Gerald W. Page), Horrorstory: Volume Three (ed. Gerald W. Page and Karl Edward Wagner), and the Grant collection A Glow of Candles and Other Stories.

Enhancing Image

Nels Anderson has moved with his family to a farm in Oxrun Station, suppoedly to get some fresh country air but really as a way to distract Nels from business problems. He’s with his wife Kelly, and his three daughters, Grace, Abbey, and Bess; he loves all his daughters, of course, but it becomes apparent that Abbey, the middle child, is his favorite. The thing is that Abbey is no longer a child—none of them are. We’re talking eighteen to twenty. Nels’s daughters are at that age where they have every right to go chasing after boys, although Nels is not ready for this—not that he wants to admit it. The narrative is thus broken up between present-day life on the farm and unattributed conversations between Nels and Kelly, which seem to be flashbacks, in which the two mostly discuss their love life and their relationship with the kids. We learn they were hoping for a son, hence them having three daughters instead of one or two. We learn Rose is Abbey’s middle name, in a bit of obvious symbolism. We also learn Abbey sometimes have nightmares, about dying, which are serious enough that her parents express concern about them. As for life on the farm, Abbey is miserable, although she’s not quick to say so, life on the farm not being what she had hoped for. She wants to appease her dad but there’s only so much she can do. Thus we have a family drama which doesn’t seem to have any horror elements, or anything supernatural going on; since this was published in F&SF we can guess something will happen, but as is typical of his work, Grant is slow to show his hand.

It could be that I’ve seen this kind of story before and that a lot has changed since the ’70s (but also not enough has changed), but I wasn’t terribly interested in Nels’s dilemma with how he should treat Abbey. There is the faintest hint that Nels is possessive of his daughter because he’s in love with her himself, and this incestuous urge is too shameful to be spoken of, but if that was an implication on Grant’s part then there’s no payoff for it. A father who is unwilling to let his 19-year-old daughter live her own life is not in itself an uncommon case, but given the conversations the two have it’s implied that no man would satisfy Nels as Abbey’s daughter because he projects himself onto the boyfriend role. This is all but confirmed when three young men (one man for each daughter) come to the property, drunk, with one saying he’s here to take Grace on a date. Grace herself says that the men had previously harassed her and Bess, and would not take no for an answer. Now, in fairness if I was a parent and three complete strangers came to my home saying they were here for a date with my kids, I would be quite skeptical. Given that the boys are being threatening, and decidedly not sober, Nels has a choice: he can try to either deescalate, or give these boys an ass-kicking. He picks the latter. This choice is framed as not the wisest of things to do, but it’s also totally understandable, and frankly it’s hard to blame Nels for kicking the men off his property. Of course, since this is ostensibly a horror story we know things will only get worse, and that the three men will figure back into the plot somehow.

Maybe this would have been more effective had it not been so short (a dozen magazine pages that go by quickly) and had it seemed like Nels had more of a choice in the course of events. Like what is he supposed to do here? The obvious point Grant wants to make is that Nels obsesses over his daughters too much and Abbey in particular, but if there’s any abuse, we don’t see it. Apparently Abbey declined to go to a high-class college so she could stay close to her family, instead (if the flashback is anything to go by) going to a local community college, which we’re told is a bad thing. Okay. What exactly is wrong with going to community college? Could you maybe illustrate more clearly to us how Abbey’s codependant relationship with her dad has made her life worse? We are told, but not really shown, that Nels is doing the wrong thing. Maybe if he had an incestuous crush on his own daughter and is trying to keep her all to himself like that then there would be a real problem, but while (like I said) there’s the faintest hint of this being the case, Grant doesn’t follow through on it. The other thing is that Nels’s unhealthy relationship with his daughter is set up to have tragic and unforeseen consequences, albeit telegraphed through Abbey’s nightmares about her dying. We all have dreams about dying, but in the context of this story Abbey’s nightmares are taken as premonitions, as if there’s something different and supernatural about them, despite nothing being shown that this is the case. I could go on for a minute, but my point is that the story’s attempt at building dread is unearned.

There Be Spoilers Here

Nels’s harsh treatment of the three men comes back to bite the family, or so it seems. The five of them go on a picnic when, from somewhere distant, a shot rings out. Then another. Kelly is wounded in the shooting and Abbey is killed, perhaps as the latter had predicted she might be. Presumably one of the men had taken to sniping at the family, but nobody sees the shooter and the three men are never arrested, on account of having lullabies. What started as a vacation home becomes a tragic memory. It isn’t until the very end that the story turns supernatural—maybe. Nels refuses to leave the farm, with the rest of the family even leaving him behind. He is unable to go. He talks to a big tree, the one Abbey had clung too as he died, and he hears her voice in his head. “Turnabout, father, is not always fair,” she says. She wanted to leave the farm, but now she’s stuck here, as a spirit tied to the tree. Of course, there’s nothing to prove that this isn’t just Nels talking to himself in his mind. Again I’m left wondering, what was Nels supposed to do here? Have the family leave the farm early? Send Abbey back home? Grant interrogates his protagonist but does not provide an alternate course of action. I don’t get it.

A Step Farther Out

Nope, can’t say I was a fan.

See you next time.