Witches on the Road TonightSheri Holman
Grove/Atlantic, Inc., March 2011
ISBN: 978-0802119438
From the best-selling author of "The Dress Lodger", comes a brilliant new novel about the secrets, lies, and fears that haunt several generations of one Appalachian family.
In her fourth book, Sheri Holman uses the language and imagery of horror movies to conjure up a spooky, multigenerational ghost story about the secrets that have haunted one family for more than 70 years.
Witches on the Road Tonight opens as the retired host of a 1970s kitschy horror-movie show on a local television station, “Captain Casket,” aka Eddie Alley, is about to lie down in the coffin he rose from on his show for 20 years. But this time he doesn’t plan on getting out again. Elderly, demoralized by chemotherapy and unwilling to burden his partner with more caretaking, Eddie maps out his suicide in a brief soliloquy that includes a coded phone call to his daughter, Wallis, and a look back at the origins of his fascination with monster movies.
When 12-year-old Eddie Alley is accidentally struck by a car and injured, he's thrust into a relationship with visiting WPA writer Tucker Hayes and his wife Sonia. They take the boy to his isolated shack near Panther Gap, and in order to distract him Tucker produces a hand-cranked projector and shows him an early, silent version of Frankenstein. It's the first movie Eddie has ever seen, and it fires something within him.
The arrival of Eddie's mother Cora, popularly supposed to be a witch, fires something within Tucker, and a stay which was to last only a few hours stretches into days. The recently drafted Tucker is reluctant to leave, particularly after his night-time trysts with Cora. Are they dreams? Or is she really a witch, and is Tucker under her spell? Or did Eddie just dream that up as a result of the ghost stories she tells him at night? It’s hard to tell, and Holman deliberately keeps us guessing.
Holman expertly untangles and reweaves many threads in this novel. Shifting points of view and eras allow Holman to explore an ambitious collection of themes. It's a heavy load for a slim novel, and few of the questions are answered. Instead there are hints and clues, allowing readers to decide for themselves what really happened in Panther Gap in 1940, and whether the witches and ghosts are real or imagined.
Witches on the Road Tonight is a rich and rewarding read, a blend of backwoods sorcery and ageless heartbreak. Holman's strength lies in her sensitivity to human nature and her ability to construct fantastic situations and clever relationships. Holman freely borrows from Mary Shelley, horror movies, mountain folklore and the Gothic-laced Southern coming-of-age novel to create a disturbing world, wholly her own. Superb!
SHERI HOLMAN is the author of A Stolen Tongue; The Dress Lodger, a New York Times Notable Book; and The Mammoth Cheese, short listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction and a San Francisco Chronicle and Publishers Weekly Book of the Year.
