The Locktender's House

by Steven Sherrill

Book Overview

Sherrill, the highly acclaimed author of Visits from the Drowned Girl and The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, charts new territory in this eerie, gripping novel about a young woman struggling to... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400061539
• ISBN13: 9781400061532
• Release Date: April 2008
• Publisher: Random House (NY)
• Length: 254 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.3" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Well worth reading

It is easily as good his previous books but unfortunately (maybe) it comes without any of they're humour. Even in 'a drowned girl' (itself a very odd and uncomfortable book) there was still room for that hilarious episode of the protagonist, the policeman and the chocolate phallus. In this book meanwhile there is hardly anything offered to distract us even momentarily from the muddy disquiet, the dusty oddness, the choking misery. But that said once again Mr. S has more than proven his talent and worth. My question to myself and others reading and wondering and even the Author himself if he is reading my amateurish review is this, `Is Steven Gainy Janice's father?'

"There in the woods, Janice began to reclaim pleasure."

I experienced a deep ambivalence throughout this novel, but the author's perfect rendition of Janice Witherspoon's assault by a crippling migraine allowed me enough sympathy and curiosity to stick with a protagonist I wasn't sure I could care about. Isolated from others to an almost pathological degree, Janice has no idea that her boyfriend has just been blown to bits in Iraq when she crumples to the floor in pain. But the reverberations of this percussive death reach across the world, setting the recovered, albeit still trembling girl, suitcase in hand, on an unpredictable odyssey, the haunting of a violent past and a brush with an opportunity for a normal life that Janice is unprepared to accept. Intending to meet the boyfriend's returning coffin, the young woman deviates from her intended path, from North Carolina to rural Pennsylvania, stopping in a wooded area where she moves into a rudimentary clapboard house, the "locktender's" house. A remnant of a system of channels that guided boats through a warren of connections, such methods fell out of use in the mid-1800s with the advancement of railroads. This particular house, the site of tragedy and humiliation, draws Janice into its sparse interior, igniting distant synapses that people her troubling dreams with familiar, yet unfamiliar characters, a woman whose four children are tragically killed, left to suffer the inevitable brutality of a beautiful commodity trapped in a man's world. Whether sleepwalking or lurking in the dark shadows of the house, the only promise of relief appears when Janice stumbles across a handsome neighbor, a stone sculptor who befriends the girl and attempts to help her reenter the world at large. But Janice is in the throes of something larger than herself, riddled by indescribable fears that drive her away from Stephen Grainy, directly into the cold arms of darker places, the eerie sounds of spirituals and desperate embrace of a spectral woman, the abusive harangues of a vile man, a ragged landscape that becomes more dangerous with each passing day. Janice's otherworldly fugue state is a melding of real and imagined, her quest driven beyond logic or reality. Her body violated and battered, Janice plunges ahead, convinced that she is near the psychic answers she seeks. There are "tells" along the way, small moments of cruelty that remind me to be wary of this character and her descent into a harrowing terrain of past and present, unresolved damage and the secrets contained in this refuge-turned-prison. I think of "The Shining", afraid to trust my instincts. In the end, I know nothing more than when I started, save a brief, unsettling encounter with the stuff of nightmares. Luan Gaines/ 2008.

fine psychological suspense horror thriller

In Greensboro, North Carolina Janice Witherspoon lives in her boyfriend's apartment while he serves in Iraq. She prays everyday for his safe return, but her prayers are unanswered when her boyfriend, "Private Danks," dies in the war. Janice has no time to mourn her loss; as his family kicks her out of his apartment. With no place to go, but in need of closure by seeing her beloved's corpse, something she knows his relatives will never allow her to do, Janice drives to Dover where the dead military are snuck into the country. By the time she reaches Pennsylvania, Janice realizes she has lost her grip on sanity. She decides to take a respite and finds an abandoned Locktender's House overlooking a canal lock. She soon meets rustic sculptor, Stephen Gainy; these two lonely people forge a relationship, but it is the voice and dulcimer playing of an eccentric evanescent eerie female she hears that has her dreaming again of life not death as Janice begins to explore her family's tragic past at these locks at the beginning of the previous century. This psychological suspense horror thriller takes its time to fully introduce the audience to Janice and through her memories Private Danks. Once readers understand how far Janice's depression is driving her over the edge making the veil between reality and illusion vanish, we will appreciate Steven Sherrill's superb setup that takes readers on a journey into the mind of a griever who is not allowed to grieve. This is an excellent character study of the cost of death turning survivors into the living dead who seem to make their own reality or then again perhaps the ghostly horrific past consumes energy to arise whenever tragedy leaves the present vulnerable. Harriet Klausner