A Reviewer Divided

A Reviewer Divided

08/21/2006

LeBlanc, Deborah. A House Divided. New York: Leisure, 2006. 326 p.

Once when I was doing some research for a folklore project, I interviewed natives from the lower Terrebonne Parish area, that part of Louisiana made famous in Ian Softley’s 2005 film The Skeleton Key. My research concentrated on the phenomenon known as the gris-gris, which is akin to Haitian voodoo in that it involves an incantation, locks of hair, feathers, and either the placing or lifting of a curse. One of the more colorful characters I had the pleasure of talking with was the father of my sister’s first husband, a man who had grown up around the coastal, swampy regions of the parish. The interview was going along just fine—we had talked about the gris-gris and about finding Jean Lafitte’s ghostly treasure—when suddenly he looked me straight in the eye and asked, in all seriousness, “Do you want to know how to meet the devil?”

If you are a native Louisianian, especially one from south of that part of the I-10 which runs from New Orleans to Houston (i.e., you’re not what we locals call a Yankee), you are well aware that shapeshifters like the loup-garou, and various demons and minor imps hide around every corner, behind every tree in every swamp. Perhaps it is a combination of factors such as the misty and enigmatic swampland (Frost’s line “the woods are lovely, dark and deep” come to mind here), the strong Catholic influence, and the complete insularity of the people, even to this day in some areas of the region, that result in a worldview where spirits routinely inhabit the same terra firma as the living. And then there is the absolute stillness of the air, as if the concepts of eeriness and mystery hang there in an almost tangible manifestation. It should come as no surprise then that South Louisiana has produced some very good gothic and horror novelists. Anne Rice, Poppy Z. Brite and James Lee Burke come to mind immediately. Now a fourth name can be added to this trinity of creators of the Cajun and Creole otherwordly—Deborah LeBlanc.

A House Divided is only LeBlanc’s third novel (following Grave Intent and Family Inheritance), so it is too premature to predict whether she will some day share the stature or even have the staying power of Rice, Brite and Burke. However, there seems to be a consistent improvement in her ingenuity, genuineness, and technique which indicate that she has the ability to become a both a respected and popular novelist—and not just with the locals. Her strengths, as evidenced in A House Divided, are her ability to successfully capture the mood and mystery of the area about which she writes, and her penchant for creating sympathetic, and for the most part, believable characters who seem to come out of the scenery itself, as if they emerged golem-like from the Lafayette area clay. This is a high compliment indeed, by the way, for my own personal theory of understanding an indigenous population involved looking closely at maps of the area being studied. As the land flows, so do the people who inhabit that land. It determines everything from their eating habits, to their housing choices, to their overall worldview. Nonetheless, and even though I enjoyed this novel, I could not help but notice problem areas; in short, these glare at the educated reader to the point where he or she is constantly reminded that this is a relatively new writer who has yet to hit her stride.

Before I get into specifics however, I feel it necessary to give a brief synopsis of the novel, which, as I mentioned previously, is quite ingenuous in its conception. Don’t get me wrong here. A House Divided doesn’t exactly redefine the haunted house subgenre. Rather it finds a colorful and interesting possibility by playing off of a routine practice—that of cutting up an old, spacious house in order to move it. The only problem is that this house has ghosts that do not want to be separated from one another. The novel begins around the Crowley area, where a somewhat avaricious and shady construction contractor named Keith LaFleur meets with an acquisitions manager for a big drugstore chain to discuss moving a spacious home so that the land can serve as a new store location. LaFleur is in no way a likable character—he is considering cheating on his wife with the drugstore chain representative, flirting with her in front of his brother-in-law who happens to be his chief foreman—and he quickly suffers a fate reserved for the wicked when he is bitten by what turns out to be a supernatural brown recluse spider. The construction firm cuts the building in half in order to move it to the small town of Windham, where half of it becomes a hair salon and the other half becomes a local diner, with the two buildings standing basically across the street from one another.

Locals Laura Toups, a hairdresser, and Tawana Batiste, her friend who does manicures and pedicures, open The Beauty Box, while a stranger to the town, Matt Daigle, is the proprietor of the Tin Cup Diner. In what seems like a completely unnecessary subplot, Toups and Daigle share a strong attraction to one another, and she is fond of his preadolescent son Seth. The other main character is Batiste’s mentally disabled and somewhat autistic niece, Moweez, who also happens to have the talent of precognition. Moweez, however, is unable to clearly express her visions because she possesses few language skills, a plot device which helps to add both eeriness and suspense to the story. Before long, inexplicable events begin to occur, centered around the two establishments, as what Moweez calls the “coming together” is set into motion. Some of the nicer touches in the novel are these paranormal events, which include more attacks from ghostly spiders, whole flocks of birds dropping dead on just the two properties, and an ill-fated Courir de Mardi Gras celebration that leaves a body count. What comes across as being completely gratuitous and at points even irritating is one of the other subplots: for some reason which makes no sense whatsoever in the grand scheme of the tale, LaFleur transforms into a boil-covered maniac who goes around killing people with a nail gun. I found myself “fast forwarding” through those chapters, thinking that this tangent certainly must have been introduced by some editor who felt that novel needed more gore. That is never a good sign by the way. The backstory behind the horror is the tragic tale of the Devillier family, an Andrea Yates tale where post-partum depression degenerates into psychosis, resulting in a murder-suicide.

While characterization and main plot are very strong in A House Divided, the novel falls flat when it comes to local color/regionalism, dialect, and veracity. This is not to say that non-Louisianians won’t find out a little about phenomena like the treateuse or the Courir de Mardi Gras, but all these readers get is a glimpse. It’s almost as if any event, in any part of the country, that required men on horseback could have sufficed for the scene in which the Courir plays a large role. Absent from the novel are also local eating habits and the Cajun dialect. Almost none of the main characters have an accent. There are no scenes which indicate anything about how Cajuns dress, what they watch on television, what kind of music they listen to, or even that dancing is a big part of the lifestyle. The most we see are locals with a can of Budweiser in each hand, a description so generic as to be useless. Finally, and this may be more a matter of personal taste than anything, it is endlessly annoying that despite the fact that three different characters are seeing evidence of ghostly visitations, it takes almost an act of congress for them to tell each other what they’ve experienced, and therefore share pieces of a puzzle that can be assembled towards a big picture. I know it is formulaic to the genre to draw everything out as much as possible, but really good writers break with formula, so there is no authorial excuse for such an irritating motif. Besides, in an area like South Louisiana, people are usually pretty quick to tell you if they think something is otherworldly or just weird. It would seem to me that while there might be a reason that Matt, Laura, and Tawana would not want to tell the local sheriff that they suspect the occult, there is no earthly reason why they wouldn’t tell each other, and quickly, especially after the dead birds incident makes it clear to everyone and their dogs (but apparently not to the main characters) that somehow their ghostly visitations are interrelated and their fates interdependent. Instead, sharing of information gets dragged out over two or three chapters.

Regardless of the aforementioned problems, I have to end this review where it started, with the statement that for the most part, A House Divided is a good read. LeBlanc has a strong sense of how to create a fertile atmosphere for horror—incorporating spirit visits in the night, flocks of dead birds on only two properties, spider webs that cover an entire back yard, and a soothsayer who tells the future not with words, but with mysterious drawings and paintings that require interpretation. For the most part, she creates an atypical haunted house plot while exploring issues like post-partum depression, motherhood, racism, non-traditional family units, and the ethical treatment of the mentally disabled. And she does leave some loose ends, which makes sense when one is dealing with the supernatural. My gut feeling is that current LeBlanc fans, as well as readers who have yet to pick up one of her books, will enjoy what amounts to a tense thriller.