Vexed by Vikings
Finch, Paul. Cape Wrath. Tolworth, Surrey, England: Telos Publishing, 2002. 123 p.
by June Pulliam
When the group of archeology students arrived on the lonely island of Craeghatir,
in search of the tomb of Ivar, the 9th century Viking who made quite a
reputation for himself raping and pillaging his way through the British Isles, I
already knew what was going to happen. To avoid being a spoiler, I'll tell you
what I knew was not going to happen: the group would make the archeological find
of the century and return home safely. After all, this is a horror novel, and
the sea around the island was churning dangerously, and one of the party spotted
a rare eagle upon arrival (eagles were one of the birds sacred to the Vikings).
You do the math. They were all royally screwed from the start, and if this were
anything but a horror novel, they'd have the good sense to pack it in and head
back to where they came from.
However, my foreknowledge of events to come didn't diminish my enjoyment of Paul
Finches novella. Cape Wrath is a combination of subtlety and gory
details. Soon after the party finds what they've come looking for, they are
killed, one by one, in a variety of sacrificial deaths the Vikings reserved for
the bravest warriors or kings they wished to humble before the newly captured
populace and whose best qualities they wished to sacrifice to Odin. Among these
methods of death are the Blood Eagle and the Walk. The victim of the Blood Eagle
has his back flayed, exposing his spine, before his posterior ribs are rent
asunder and his lungs are pulled through the incisions, giving him the
appearance of having eagle's wings. This sacrifice is meant to pass along the
strength of the victim's breath. The Walk transmits the courage of the enemy's
guts when his abdomen is slit open, then one end of his intestines is tied to a
rock or a pole and the victim is forced to walk around this object until all 22
or so feet of his innards are wrapped around the anchor.
While these things are gory and memorable, they're presented in a way calculated
to horrify the reader rather than for their shock value. Cape Wrath is a nice
mixture of psychological and action-oriented horror. This mixture seems to be
typically British; I've observed it in other, better known writers as varied as
Simon Clark and J. Sheridan LeFanu. Finches particular talent lies in his
ability to write about ordinary people in extraordinary situations and represent
their reactions as believable.