Clark’s Tower Leans Towards the Mundane

by June Pulliam

11/01/2005

Clark, Simon. The Tower.  New York: Leisure, 2005. 353 p.

When Simon Clark’s newest novel arrived in the Necropsy offices, I immediately called dibbs, since I have truly enjoyed some of his earlier works such as Blood Crazy, Darkness Demands, Nailed by the Heart and Vampyrric.  In these novels Clark demonstrated himself to be a master of the genre, a writer who could craft a truly frightening and original tale with memorable characters and plots. Alas, Clark hasn’t always been a consistent writer. His sequel to John Wyndham’s classic Day of the Triffids, Night of the Triffids, was a competent but ultimately unmemorable continuation of the original. And the more recent In This Skin and Darker had potential in that each had fairly original monsters, but both of these works fizzled and failed to deliver their initial promise. The Tower is yet another dull addition to the voluminous body of haunted house stories. 

The plot is basically this: an up and coming band is thrilled to be able to stay at The Tower, an ancient house that has currently changed hands, and which needs a caretaker until the new owner can begin renovations. The house’s remote location is an added attraction, since the band will have plenty of uninterrupted time to practice their songs, before they head for the recording studio. But of course there’s a catch, this one along the lines of whoever said “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” was just plain stupid. The gift horse, this house, is inhabited by an evil presence, which picks off the band members one by one. Naturally, the women attached to various male members of the band are the first to go, and meet the most grisly of fates.

There are some disturbing elements to the story, such as the physical presence of the house itself. The rambling mansion is built around a medieval stone farmhouse, which can still be accessed and seen in its entirety. Inside the old farmhouse now resides something called the Good Heart, a clock with chimes so loud they can be heard a mile away. Apparently clocks such as this were a staple of old houses in the days before electricity, since they functioned rather like school bells, allowing everyone to be on time. But the booming chimes of the Good Heart are an ominous presence, scaring everyone out of their wits by shattering the peace at hourly intervals, and later, by announcing someone’s demise after one has had the death dream, a terrifying vision of how one will die in The Tower.

The truly sad thing about this novel is it had all of the elements of a really fine story. I was particularly intrigued by the idea of an even older dwelling contained whole within a much larger and newer building, and according to Clark, apparently this practice was not unheard of centuries ago, when landholders wished to build more grand and commodious homes, but also didn’t want to do away with their past. But throughout the book, after one character gets caught in the medieval farm house while attempting to silence the Good Heart, and therefore must be rescued, no one ever gets some flashlights and explores this ancient structure. Wouldn’t curiosity make some of these characters want to explore, or perhaps when some of the other characters go missing, wouldn’t someone think that perhaps the old house might hold the key to the strange disappearances—and think to go down there?

The remote location can also be used to good effect in horror; witness what George Romero did with Night of the Living Dead, where the group of seven must not only fight the zombies outside, but each other. Here, there is no ground line to call out, and no one can get a cell phone tower either, so the group is cut off from the world. However, dull characterization of both the people and of the house meant that Clark wasn’t able to fully take advantage of this element. In short, this novel suffers from weak characters who are more types than fleshed out individuals. It was all the same to me whether they lived or died; I really couldn’t care about any of them. The only really compelling character was the dog Jak, a near-dead stray that the group finds on the rainy night they arrive at The Tower and bring inside. Jak is their Anubis, representing that mythical jackal-headed canine, and protecting his humans. But Jak wasn’t enough to redeem this novel, where the ending failed to shed any light on why The Tower was haunted, or why Jak was even there to help anyone. It was as if the author simply got tired of telling this story and wanted to stop.

Phil Rickman’s 1994 novel December has a similar theme, of a band who records in a studio which is built on the ruins of an ancient Welsh castle, only to be hideously cursed for daring to venture onto the property. The difference is that Rickman’s version of this story is infinitely superior to Clark’s. So my advice to readers: when you’re in the horror section, go past the C’s and find Rickman’s book. Or when you skip The Tower in favor of December, if you cannot find Rickman at B&N or Books-A-Million (he is getting harder to find in the U.S., even on-line), see if you can get your local library to obtain a copy of December. Others in your community will thank you.