Storytellersunplugged

By Janet Berliner

Last night, I reread some of the stories in David Niall Wilson’s short story collection, DEFINING MOMENTS. The stories are written from the inside out. That’s why they’re brilliant. You’re IN the characters, at the place, feeling the pain and the pleasure. The book is a limited edition, so why am I promoting it here by using it as the title of this essay?

As a tribute to Dave, in thanks for the work he’s done keeping Storytellers Unplugged healthy. Thank you, Dave.

Since DEFINING MOMENTS may be hard to get your hands on, I also wanted to make mention of Dave’s next book, ANCIENT EYES, which conveniently comes out in a couple weeks (and sports equally beautiful cover art by Dave’s friend Don Paresi).

I planned to write a long review myself, when Dave’s and my agent pointed out this review from Nate Kenyon that appeared on Horror World last August.

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Deep in the hills, there are different rules. Things shift, boundaries blur and time warps with the sudden, powerful draw of blood.

Although this sentence opens chapter nine of Wilson’s latest, Ancient Eyes, it could serve as the introduction to this stunningly surreal and deeply poetic work. When Abe Carlson’s nightmares lead to violent outbursts, and the strange phone calls increase in frequency, he knows that something is terribly wrong. Then a cryptic letter arrives from his mother back home in the mountains, and he must return to the place he grew up-and where, many years before, a great battle was staged. With his father’s help, goodness and light triumphed over evil back then; but now Abe fears that evil has returned to the little mountain town, and he is the only one who can protect the family he has left behind, and the place he once called home.

Meanwhile, two powerful spirits have lured Silas Greene and many of his neighbors from the mountain into the deep woods, where they are baptized by fire into the spirits’ service. They work quickly to rebuild one of two old churches in town, the home of many dark and cruel rituals many years before. As Abe arrives to take his place at the head of the second church, the one that his own father built years before, a new battle is already beginning, one as old as the mountain itself. Abe must risk his life and those of everyone he holds dear in a showdown that pits Silas Greene and his followers against those who still believe in goodness, and the ancient rituals that have ruled their lives from the moment their blood ancestors settled the land.

In a return to his horror roots, Wilson is in top form with Ancient Eyes. The story is compelling and the writing is beautiful, rhythmic and hypnotic, building slowly to a breathless end. Wilson has always straddled the line between poetry and prose, and he is known for exploring humankind’s darkest and most complex histories, and this novel is no different. But Ancient Eyes contains a more straightforward horror-style plot than his previous Deep Blue or The Mote in Andrea’s Eye.

In the novel Wilson uses wilderness as character, a constant presence that humankind is barely holding at bay. The very vegetation is alive, vines and weeds snaking around ankles and holding fast, while the mountain looms over all as if ready to pounce at any moment. Even the people who populate the backwoods town are often closer to animal than human. Rage, lust and instinct rule over civilized thought. Whether this kind of behavior is the result of possession is almost beside the point; for the spirit that possesses is really the animal within all of us, the id of human experience.

There is religion here too, but it is not the whitewashed, sterile, hushed-toned modern kind; rather, it is the raw, rough and gritty sort of centuries past, where a love of God was linked to a love of the land, and sex, blood and death was as much a part of life as anything else. Satan is a physical presence, and the threat is as much to life and limb as it is to the spiritual soul.

Ancient Eyes explores the concept that an older way still exists within the modern world. This life is full of the fear of the unknown, and rife with the rituals that evolve to compensate for it. In this world blood is indeed thicker than water; and bloodlines are tied to the mountain, rooted as firmly as the trees in the endless forest.
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I couldn’t have said it better myself. Check out the Bloodletting Press web site, where you can get a free copy of Dave’s THIS IS MY BLOOD with your copy of ANCIENT EYES for a limited time.