Black Creek Crossing by John Saul

Based on the blurb, I was expecting Black Creek Crossing to be ghostlit, but it turned out to be more of a witch novel. Or more precisely, a ghost-witch book. A witch from the days of Colonial times makes her presence known, but she is also a ghost because, well, she died 300 years ago. Unfortunately, also residing in this haunted New England house is an entity of pure, unadulterated evil who encourages men to act on their basest urges.

Up until the end (we’ll come to that), the supernatural element seemed an adjunct to this morality tale of human frailty. The problems that afflict this community are more natural than supernatural—child abuse, teen bullying, the specter of incest. The community of Roundtree is aware of the cruelty in its midst. The church knows, the school knows, the parents know, and yet no one intervenes. This indifference and these inhumane acts fester in a cesspool of insularity—the same insularity that existed in this town and others like it during the Colonial Era. The long ago New England villages of the witch trials promoted intolerance and ignorance, and author John Saul capitalizes on this historical setting to deepen the sense of impending doom.

I read this during the annual Supernatural Fiction Readers group read on Goodreads. One of the other readers in the group observed that Black Creek Crossing felt like a young adult novel. At times I noticed that too, partly because the principal characters, Angel and Seth, are teens. Right away I was reminded of Eleanor & Park as both sets of young adults fall outside of conventional teen molds. For instance, both Eleanor and Angel are overweight and wary of the attentions of their father figures. Later I thought of another YA novel, Thirteen Reasons Why because Thirteen Reasons Why as well as Black Creek Crossing explores the theme that action causes consequences, often unintended. More importantly—and maybe this is true IRL* as well—inaction causes consequences, often unintended and often deadly.

So…deadly consequences. This brings us to the story’s conclusion. Some have complained about the violence of the ending (though others have complained that the gore was too slow in coming). Black Creek Crossing did not provide the ending I had hoped for, which is to say the extent of brutality in this book disappointed me. I have seen this escalation of violence in other works of horror like the movie Poltergeist and James Herbert’s novel The Ghosts of Sleath, so I guess there is a tradition of this plot device in the horror genre—kind of like that booming, ear-crushing finale you get at the conclusion of fireworks displays as if fireworks were not already sufficiently exciting. The ending of Black Creek Crossing did not scare me (not like Poltergeist; I was so unprepared for that ending I didn’t sleep all night). No, the ending of Black Creek Crossing made me very sad.

There’s this thing, this idea called intertextuality, and it means that all the books, movies, paintings, newspaper articles, billboards a writer has ever encountered are all bouncing around in his or her head and that all these books and movies and so on influence what that writer writes. I think there’s also a reader intertextuality (or at least I have it. Is there a cure?), and my head is stuffed with all the stories I’ve read and heard and watched (probably why I can’t do math; there’s just no room in there). For me, the real value—and it’s a transformative one—of Black Creek Crossing is that it connected me to other texts and these other texts reinforced author John Saul’s study of the rippling pond of action and inaction on the lives of others, and in some way made me want to be even more thoughtful about what I say and do in my life.

As I said, I read this book as part of the Supernatural Fiction Readers group read on Goodreads led by Werner Lind. It’s an annual event, so I hope you’ll check it out for next year!

*In teen speech, IRL translates to In Real Life.