After 18 Years, Valley of Lights Still a Compelling and Original Novel

by June Pulliam

11/01/2005

Gallagher, Stephen. Valley of Lights. Tolworth, Surrey: Telos, 2005. © 1987. 298 p.
 

Originally published in 1987 by New English Library, Stephen Gallagher’s Valley of Lights stands the test of time. Gallagher’s novel is a combination of the police procedural and monster narrative, a blend that writer Graham Masterton has become particularly adept at writing of late. Phoenix police sergeant Alex Volchak discovers in a sleazy hotel room three comatose men: one, a middle aged and well-dressed businessman; another, a short, muscular man in his late thirties; and the third, a black teenager. At first, he surmises that this is just a collection of drunks sleeping off a bender, but the hotel manager informs Alex that these men have apparently been in this state for four days. All they have in common is the person who rented the room, a thin man who rapidly sprints away when he discovers that the police have found his “party guests,” dropping a huge bag of baby food behind him. The unresponsive inmates of the hotel room are taken to the hospital, and it is discovered that turning them over on to their stomachs proves fatal. Meanwhile, the city is being terrorized by a vicious serial killer who savages children.

Alex hunts for the sprinting man only to discover that he is on the trail of nothing human; instead he finds himself chasing something that can switch bodies the way humans can change clothing. In fact, this creature keeps different types of spare humans around so he can use their flesh to do his bidding (and nourishes the reserve bodies with baby food in the interim).

As Alex searches the city for this killer, we learn more about him as well. Alex is one of those typical characters found in the police procedural–a down and out cop with no family life to get in the way of his monomaniacal pursuit of his profession. But for all of Alex’s being a recognizable character, he is not rendered a cardboard cutout in Gallagher’s capable hands. He’s someone with a complex range of emotions, as evidenced by his musings on his troubled relationship with his late wife, or his budding relationship with a widowed neighbor, as facilitated by her nine-year-old daughter. If anything, Alex puts me in mind of those classic 1970s television bachelor detectives like Baretta, Starsky and Hutch and James Rockford in his drive to solve a case, even if it means skirting the law, though Alex is a great deal more noir than any of these television characters.

In fact, there is a real seventies feel to Valley of Lights. In 1987, Alex inhabits a world free of cell phones, the internet, and integrated databases. Several times, Alex must actually find a pay phone in order to contact someone, and at one point, he even has to hike a ways after being stranded in the desert for want of a cell phone (or the technology).

However, Valley of Lights ultimately stands the test of time as something worth reprinting in this Telos Classic edition because Gallagher’s monster is so original. This creature without a name takes humans to the brink of death and possesses them in order to continue his existence, which has persisted so long that even he doesn’t remember his own origins. But immortality (or longevity) doesn’t cause him to feel a great love for mortals as is the case with Anne Rice’s Lestat or Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Count Saint Germain. Instead, he’s so contemptuous of human life, particularly young human life, that his only pleasure is derived from Schadenfreude, or the joy of seeing others suffer royally. Gallagher’s immortal is enigmatic and original, and not often imitated in later horror fiction. The only example that comes close is the 1998 film Fallen, where a serial killer laughs as he’s executed, claiming that he’ll be back, and indeed he is, possessing bodies of unsuspecting people to continue his work.1

Telos has done a good thing by reissuing Valley of Lights, which is still fairly original and not terribly dated. And the classic edition comes with a few bonus features as well, including an introduction by Stephen Laws and a lengthy interview with the author following the novel.