The Horror? The Horror?

by Tony Fonseca

01/18/2007

Gonzalez, J. F. The Beloved. New York: Leisure, 2006. 369 p.

One of the more interesting tidbits associated with any Leisure title is the prose sample that begins virtually every novel. This serves two purposes in that it first allows casual bookstore shoppers to get a feel for both the writer’s style and the scare/gore quotient of the book, and once the novel has been purchased, it helps readers to decide whether they are in the mood for the particular title, acting as a sort of appetizer that signals the meal to come. In the case of J. F. Gonzalez’s The Beloved, this front matter sample, given the impromptu title “Something Not Human,” serves no greater purpose than to mislead readers into believing they are actually getting ready to read a horror novel.

Now I have a pretty liberal definition of what constitutes horror, one that can encompass a wide range of writers and styles, from Cullen to King to Ligotti to Rice to Yarbro. I can see how even weird/strange tales by Serling, Aickman, Nicholson and Hirshberg straddle both the gothic and the horrifying. I cannot, however, understand how The Beloved gets categorized as horror, nor can I fathom the reason (other than marketability perhaps) that Gonzalez added what amounts to maybe two dozen pages of horror imagery into what is otherwise a straightforward relationship novel about the perils of online dating.

Granted, Gonzalez opens the story with what can only be called a scene from horror, in which Don Grant follows his cheating wife to an apartment complex in order to kill her and her lover, only to discover that bullets have no power against what turns out to be an incubus. Grant’s story then takes a back seat to the tale of a loser named Ronnie Baker, who is bringing Diana, his internet girlfriend, to Ohio to meet his father, mother and sister. They immediately take a dislike to her—not because she exudes evil or has an ominous presence, but because she is demanding and lazy. In short, Baker has found a loser like himself, but one who knows how to land lonely men online. From this point on, The Beloved reads more like a dating polemic than a good horror yarn, and it takes quite a while before the next unreal event occurs, in an all-too-brief scene between Diana and Baker’s ex-wife. The novel then becomes mundane and in no way otherworldly again, as Diana begins to win over the mother, with only a dream-like scene involving Baker’s daughter by his ex to tilt the story towards the horrifying. Book II ends as did the first book, with death (or more specifically many deaths).

It is only in Book III that the novel finally starts to border on becoming more than a horror novel in name only, when Don Grant searches out and finds Gregg Weaver (the son-in-law and only survivor of the carnage of the second book’s ending). Together, along with the help of a few friends, they hunt down and terminate Diana and her brood, as she is discovered to be the succubi version of the demon seen in Chapter 1.

After reading The Beloved, readers will have to scratch their heads and ask themselves where a publisher draws the line between drama and horror when marketing a literary product. Does a novel become a horror novel simply because each of its three books ends with a supernatural scene involving a demon? Considering this issue myself, I first had to rely on my intuition: The Beloved is not a horror novel, regardless of the few demonic scenes, because it does not read like a horror novel. In other words, what is noticeably absent throughout the story is the atmosphere of Gothicism, the overwhelming sense that something otherworldly is controlling events—no matter how ordinary or mundane those events might be. Here, the feeling readers are likely to get is that the horror scenes were added so that the novel could be called horror. Perhaps the dead giveaway is that if one were to delete the scenes of horror, turning Diana into a gold digger/stalker, the story itself would not be changed in any significant way.

Yes, I do realize that horror uses the metaphorical and that there is such a creature as the horror of the ordinary. But even a novel like David Searcy’s Ordinary Horror, or the latest Bentley Little publication, very clearly rings true as a horror text. In texts such as these, hardly a chapter will go by without something menacing—and more than likely supernatural—occurring. In contrast, The Beloved is an example of an author’s being almost prodded as an afterthought to reintroduce the supernatural at the ends of major sections, and it purports to be a novel of cosmic horror, not one that is psychologically disquieting, a la Ramsey Campbell.

That being said, I will admit that Gonzalez is one of the better writing talents among Leisure’s stable. I thought very highly of Clickers (with Mark Williams, Dark Tales, 2000) and was impressed with his skill in That’s All Folks! (Yard Dog Press, 2004). If The Beloved were released without the incubi/succubi element, it could well stand on its own as a mainstream tale about the kinds of victims and victimizers that can be found in online chat rooms and matchmaking sites.

It’s a bit more difficult to say whether the addition of a more gothic atmosphere, a more menacing tone, and more scenes of otherworldly horror would make this into an excellent horror text, as there is no real point of reference given the lack of those elements throughout.