Torments (1990) by Lisa W. Cantrell
I love Merrillville in the autumn
Readers unfamiliar with Torments may prefer to read these notes only after reading the novel.
Barthes thought certain kinds of writing—perhaps we should say, certain kinds of sentences —to be scriptible , because they made you wish to write further yourself; they stimulated imitation, and promised a pleasure in combining language that had little enough to do with the notation of new ideas.
Fredric Jameson
Introduction to Signatures of the Visible (1992)
Torments revisits the Merrillville, NC real estate originally set alight in Cantrell's The Manse (1987).
Some who organized the previous novel's Jaycees haunted house, and its ticket-buyers, have also returned.
The bad news? They're dead.
All joking aside, Cantrell has found some new live ones to join her small-town nightmare.
Salem's Lot, IT, and Straub's Floating Dragon all cast long shadows here.
* * *
Comparative analysis of Torments by Lisa W. Cantrell, considering its connection to The Manse:
Torments (1990)
Plot: Small-town horror, psychological trauma, supernatural forces, mystery, and suspense. The plot unfolds through a series of interconnected events and character experiences.
Setting: Merrillville, North Carolina, two years after the events of The Manse. Focus is the new condominium complex built on the site of the destroyed Manse, the town's cemetery, and other familiar locations.
Characters: Returning characters from The Manse like Samantha Evers and Ted Nathan, alongside new characters like Vince Colletti.
Style: King-ish: Descriptive and atmospheric, building suspense and a good sense of unease.
Point of View: Primarily third-person limited, shifting between different characters' perspectives to offer insights into their individual experiences and struggles.
* * *
Similarities and Differences between Torments and The Manse
Similarities:
Setting and Location: Both novels are set in the same fictional town, Merrillville, North Carolina.
Themes: The enduring power of the evil place, the consequences of past actions, and the fragility of the everyday.
Style: Both novels employ a descriptive and atmospheric style, creating suspense and unease
Differences:
Plot: The Manse telescopes three years of mounting weirdness toward immediate horror and the characters' struggle for survival during a single Halloween night. Torments does the same, though with greater simplicity.
Characters: Torments introduces new characters who bring fresh perspectives and complexities to the narrative.
Themes: Torments focuses on condominium construction on a project that is over time and over budget. The Manse focused on the local Jaycees doing a final Halloween Haunted House fundraiser before losing access to the manse.
Point of View: The Manse alternated pov around a number of high and low characters, as does, Torments.
* * *
Torments (1990) has a hard carapace of serious adulthood about it. The larking, hell-hungry punks all died in The Manse. In Torments, we have the thirtysomething horror of schedule delays and cost-overruns on a condo project where new construction casts more shadows at noon than the old manse ever did at midnight.
* * *
In 1987, The Manse needed more attention to plot, and better all-round delineation. I'm sure the fact that it was published by that notorious fuck-up machine, Tor, made this impossible. But 1990’s Torments clearly benefited. Cantrell made more, and made it clearer, in this novel.
But by 1990, the “horror boom” had given consumers too many small-town-secrets plots.
Jay
30 September 2024
