This Old House: House of Blood is Nothing New

by June Pulliam

01/30/2005

House of Blood. Bryan Smith. New York: Leisure, 2004. 369 p.

I really wanted to like House of Blood. After all, it began in such a clichéd way—a carload of young adults who have known each other for years are returning from a road trip gone sour, only to find themselves having taken the wrong turn to deadly misadventure. I hoped, vainly, that Bryan Smith wouldn’t be taking me, an innocent bystander reader, seasoned horror fan, and critic of the genre, down this same path.  I kept thinking, wishfully more than likely, that maybe instead he was taking these character types we all know so well from B horror flicks such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and doing something interesting and original with them, in the vein of House of 1000 Corpses or even The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Silly me.

The novel begins with Dream Weaver (the stupid moniker our heroine is stuck with, thanks to her New Age parents) and her friends returning from the aforementioned road trip. There is the obligatory bed hopping and sexual tension among the group, and so of course, relationships are rather strained because someone’s feelings were hurt. A big screaming fight ensues in a small Honda, and Dream, the driver, decides that she has had enough. To teach her brawling buddies a lesson, she turns off of the beaten path of the interstate, and the troupe finds itself lost in the middle of rural Tennessee (at this point most readers begin to hear the banjo music and can envision hillbillies peeking from the foliage like flesh eating gorillas waiting to devour hapless “city folk”). These things don’t happen in the book, which is ironically unfortunate, for the story might be interesting if they did.

To make a long story short (hear that, Mr. Smith?), they are lost, so they stop to get their bearings. One of their party vanishes, so the remaining members of the group set off in search of representatives of authority, or even civilization, who can help. What they find is a dour, middle-aged woman who promises to take them to The Master. It was at this point that I knew the novel was already in trouble. Whenever a writer capitalizes a regular old noun to make it ostensibly pregnant with meaning, instead it turns out to be a banal rouse.

The Master resides in what appears to be a relatively modest home, conveniently located in the middle of nowhere in East Tennessee. He oversees a complex lair of dungeons filled with human slaves and other creatures endowed with supernatural powers, and sado-masochistic sex is the order of the day. Dear reader, you might think things would be getting interesting about now, and surprisingly, you’d be wrong. We soon learn that the Master is particularly intrigued by Dream, since she is apparently The One, the individual who was born to be his antithesis, who can topple his evil empire. Okay, so you know where this is going now, so I will spare the details.

The saddest part of this fictional travesty is that Bryan Smith does not lack talent as a writer. I was drawn into his first chapters because even though I immediately recognized his characters as clichés, he has a flair for bringing them alive as recognizable people.  But a novel needs more than recognizable characters. People read fiction, even horror fiction mind you, to transcend the mundane. Characters, like flesh and blood human beings, need new stories, and they aren’t finding one in this novel.