The Bloodwind (1982)

Approaching Charles L. Grant (1942-2006)

Readers unfamiliar with The Bloodwind (1982) by Charles L. Grant may prefer to read these notes only after reading the novel.

Both as a novel of campus faculty politics, and as a novel of occult onslaught motivated by sexual jealousy, The Bloodwind (1982) is unexceptional

For the first two-thirds of the story, narrative softness and banality hold sway. Grant's shorter works are typically graced with snap and sharpness. Here the to-ing and fro-ing of the heroine and her cohort do not rise above the soporific. When showdown and climax come, the style remains perfunctory.

*   *   *

As The Bloodwind begins, all is not well at Hawksted College, Oxrun Station, Connecticut.

Protagonist Dr. Patrice Lauren Shavers, an accomplished sculptor, is appointed full professor and head of the newly launched fine arts school. But her satisfaction is short-lived: professional and personal relations quickly turn sour.  And typical of a Grant protagonist, Patrice comes already over-determined: family money, divorce, and just getting over witnessing the drowning death of her eight year old daughter. 

Soon after Patrice's professional success, her hearing-impaired neighbor Abbey Wagner begins a magical working with an accomplice. Patrice is its target. (Abbey sees herself as Patrice's rival for the attentions of painter and instructor Grant Billings. Why two creative and resourceful women would let a dud like Grant Billings figure in their lives is not explained). The working alters Patrice's sense of reality, and of her relationships. A prized sculpture seems to drop out of the world, then returns. Students previously comprising her departmental cult of personality grow resentful, then menacing.

Abbey's identity as antagonist is kept secret until the novel's final chapter. This is an unfortunate choice by Charles L. Grant, making each manifestation of the bloodwind more confusing than the last. This contributes significantly to the longueurs the reader must endure as Patrice fidgets about whether she is having a breakdown. 

Grant's story "I See Her Sweet And Fair," collected in The Orchard (1986), handles a similarly motivated showdown between two determined women protagonists with greater clarity and economy.

*   *   *

The Bloodwind has an extended horror scene that -- a case can perhaps be made -- verges on the cosmic. Late on a winter afternoon, Patrice visits a disused stone quarry from which she previously rescued blocks for artwork.

 The wind ignored her. It grumbled and shrieked behind her, magnified by the quarry's throat, smothering her bird-weak prayers and sending daggers of pain into her ears.

 At the top, turning and not wanting to turn, seeing the pillar rise above the quarry, seeing within it a creature deep red still masked by the white. Yet it was there. She could see it. She could see . . . something ... an arm, a tentacle, a limb of some sort thrashing about as if seeking a way to smash through whatever held it. A flare, then. An eye. The vague outline of a head turning like a beacon; turning, stopping, and she knew it had seen her.

 It bellowed.

 Whatever head it had, whatever throat it had, it raised the one and stretched the other and it bellowed its challenge, unmistakable and enraged. Immediately, the snow lifted from the ground and blinded her, made her windmill her arms as her boot came down on a patch of ice. She stumbled forward, sideways, and fell. Sprawled. The snow climbing over her, insects of ice that slipped down her collar and into her ears, into her eyes, past her clenched lips and into her mouth. She tumbled, slid, tumbled again the full hundred yards down to the trail. An elbow cracked viciously against the ground and she screamed, feeling the numbness climb to her shoulder; her forehead glanced off a rock, and there were more colors than white, none of them red, burning Catherine wheels through her vision until she cried again; her knee; her back; and the snow swarmed around her, no longer soft, no longer gentle, striking her like pebbles even after she regained her feet and started running again.

 The trail rose, and she sobbed. She was heading in the wrong direction. She turned helplessly, looked back once over her shoulder and saw something . . . red . . . climbing over the crest.

 It bellowed.

 It challenged.

*   *   *

Gore Vidal once remarked in an essay that writers often give their characters artistic careers in a medium said writer is not equipped to accurately depict. Grant does an adequate job depicting Patrice's sculptures and her craft: the pall of stone dust, tiny chiseled chips that land in clothes and hair. As Grant Billings tells her in an intimate moment, "You smell like stone."

Like wood sculptor Herb in “My Mary's Asleep” (The Orchard), Patrice will find an unexpected use for one of her works before the novel ends.

*   *   *

The closing paragraphs of The Bloodwind are an affecting “long view” of Patrice's future, and the one instance in the novel of an arresting stylistic moment.

She and Grant discuss the looming imprisonment of Abbey Wagner.

 "You're really not going to tell [Wes Martin] about—what did you call it, the bloodwind?"

 "No," she said. "I just . . . Greg, if she can do it once, she can do it again."

 "She'll be in prison for murder, Pat. For the rest of her life."

 She turned to him suddenly, Homer slipping from her grasp and sliding to the floorboard between her feet. "She'll have a lawyer, Greg, a good one. She's not stupid; she knows. She'll be jailed, I know that, but sooner or later she's going to get out. One way or another she's going to get out."

 Greg could not meet her stare. Instead, he waved off her fears with an insincere half-smile and opened the door, and as he passed in front of the hood, now in the light, now in the dark, she knew what she'd be doing for the rest of her life—

 Working at the college, perhaps loving Greg again, making amends with her parents and trying to keep Harriet on course; fighting with Danvers, watching Stephen and Janice marry, doing her own work better and perhaps achieving another level of success; fixing her car, repainting the apartment, adopting a child to prove she hadn't really lost Lauren.

 More than she could handle; enough to bring her ease.

 Until the sun set. [My emphasis].

 Then she would turn out the lights and stand at the window, stand at the window and listen for the wind.

 Every night, every year. Standing. And listening. While Abbey was in prison, perfecting her hate.

This suspension of unresolved action that we might expect -- at the end of a novel -- to be settled indicates some of the access to energy Grant could have employed earlier in the book. The year of The Bloodwind's publication, 1982, saw the opening of a period when horror novels were moving from around 200 to 400 pages. Grant's novel would have benefited from such scope, allowing for alternating points of view to fully dramatize its conflict. Among countless examples of this type of novel done the right way, I recommend Chet Williamson's masterful  Dreamthorp (1989).

Jay

24 April 2024