Enter, Night is to ’Salems Lot as ’Salems Lot was to Dracula: a literary homage of sorts, but also very much its own beast.
Set in the early 1970s, it’s the story of Christina Parr, a woman who is forced to return to her isolated home town of Parr’s Landing when her husband Jack is killed, leaving her penniless and caring for her teenaged daughter Morgan. The only person who understands what she is going through is her brother-in-law Jeremy Parr, who accompanies her back to Parr’s Landing both out of a sense of duty to his brother and to give Christina some moral support.
Their surnames and the name of the town on the fringe of the Canadian wilderness are no coincidence: Jack and Jeremy are sons of the tyrannical Adeline Parr, the town’s matriarch and a widow with a heart as cold as an arctic winter. She despises both Christina and Jeremy, the former for getting pregnant to her son and then eloping with him to live in Toronto; the latter for being a homosexual and running away to live in Toronto, too, after six months of barbaric ‘treatment’ to correct his ‘problem’.
While Christina, Jeremy and Morgan are making this unpleasant pilgrimage, a vampire who goes by the name of Richard Weal is also returning to Parr’s Landing – albeit for a very different reason. In his head he is hearing the voice of a “friend” who is urging Weal to find him and set him free. Weal leaves a trail of bloodshed in his wake, and when he finds the friend he is looking for, the Parrs’ familial problems will look petty indeed. As a matter of fact, all of Parr’s Landing will be in serious trouble.
The only man with an inkling about what is going on is Dr Billy Lightning, an Indian who is investigating the murder of his adopted father and trying to track down a manuscript that was stolen from his office. It’s a translation of a text written by a French missionary, who visited Parr’s Landing centuries before it had that name.
Enter, Night swept me up as no other novel has in a long time. The story leaps off the page with an enormous, undeniable power and never lets the reader out of its clutches. Rowe’s appetite for language shines through in every sentence and he can evoke a sense of dread that lesser horror authors can only dream about. What’s more, the themes and allegories are as stout as anything you will find in ‘serious’ literary fiction. Evaluating Enter, Night purely as a reader, I have no hesitation in calling it one of the great debut novels in the horror genre – or indeed, any genre.
As a writer and a critic, however, there are some notable things that irk me.
Most are minor: characters that seem able to resist the vampiric urge long enough to suit the plot; the occasional glut of adverbs; dialogue where a person asks three or four questions in a row without waiting for a response.
More serious is the omnipotent narration, which is both distracting and a lazy way to tell the story. Why bother to find inventive methods to tell whole chapters from a single point of view when you can just head-hop between paragraphs?
I also find Rowe’s decision to tie up the story with what amounts to a long epilogue (or rather a prologue assuming the role of an epilogue) dissatisfying, even though it is a fine read in itself. Rowe spends a good 300 pages involving the reader in his characters’ lives… and then just ends the narrative abruptly. It's like riding in a prestige car for 200 miles along a magnificent stretch of highway, only to have the driver suddenly skew off onto a B-road. It leads you somewhere nice, sure, but you still sort of pine for the destination you expected.
Thus satisfying my obligation to be honest in every review, I have no reluctance whatsoever in recommending Enter, Night to anyone who enjoys horror fiction – or laments what the Twilight series did to vampire novels. This is a rich and unforgettable debut.