Hurricane Gideon

By Tony Fonseca

01/17/2005

A Review of The Wind Caller, P. D. Cacek.  New York: Dorchester, 2004. 355 p.

Being from Louisiana, I was shocked the first time I visited Phoenix. Stillness is the norm in South Louisiana. Although weather systems sometimes roll in daily from the Gulf, creating sudden rainstorms, for the most part there is a pronounced dead calm in the air. Doing a book talk on horror at the Public Libraries Association Conference in Arizona, I was shocked to find that wind can be not only chilling, but biting as well, and that a windy cold could appear seemingly out of nowhere, dropping the temperature by some fifteen degrees.

In P. D. Cacek's new novel, The Wind Caller, septuagenarian Gideon Berlander, who is slowly dying of cancer, has also discovered that the Arizona wind can be a vicious killing machine when its power is harvested by the Wind Caller, the human of Hopi legend who takes control of nature by blowing a specially made whistle that is blessed in ceremony. Berlander, who is white, stumbles into a cave as a teenager, and there finds a cowering boy from one of the local reservations. The boy, named Joseph Longwalker, is to be made the new Wind Caller, but Gideon's presence causes the wind spirit to make the two boys brothers, giving them both the power to control nature.

Gideon, however, cannot handle this power, and as an adult he begins using it to avenge himself on those who he feels has wronged him. Unfortunately for Joseph, one of those people is his first-born son, who falls in love with Gideon's eldest daughter and impregnates her while both are high school age.

The novel takes up with Gideon's granddaughter, Sky, who is the product of both family bloodlines. Sky does not know it when the action begins, but her existence is meant to reunite the powers of the Wind Caller. Unfortunately for her, she is at odds with Gideon, who must give up his power before she can accept hers. Matters worsen with the introduction of Sam Reynolds, sales representative and acquisitions expert for a land development company called Sun Country Homes. Sun Country has acquired all the land around Gideon's mountain property in order to turn the ridge into an upscale housing development for yuppies, and when we meet Sam he is using Sky to trick Gideon into giving up the twenty-three acres of land he legally owns. Gideon refuses to sell his cabin or the land that holds his wife's and daughter's graves. Once all of these disparate elements are introduced into the story, a confrontation between Gideon and the land developers is inevitable, with Joseph and Sky caught in the middle.

The final wrinkle is introduced when the reader learns that Gideon is dying of cancer, and after an altercation with a couple of Sun Country goons, one of whom is literally ripped to shreds by the wind, is laid up in ICU at the local hospital. Joseph realizes that the moment he has feared all his life, facing off against Gideon in an effort to get him to relinquish his power to Sky, is at hand. If Gideon dies while still the Wind Caller, he becomes even more powerful, a demi-spirit which rides the wind and can attack anywhere, at any time.

Although The Wind Caller is not a masterpiece, it is a memorable read that has quite a bit to recommend it to fans of the genre, especially for those who are tired of the genre's homogeneity (even though women like Cacek are of late earning well-deserved respect as horror writers, many of them are too content to reproduce the same white male dominated world readers have too often seen). The novel merges Hopi legend--from the point of view of the Hopi rather than from a Eurocentric point of view--with good old American consumerism and greed. More importantly, it adds to the dialogue on Native American mysticism and horror begun by Graham Masterton with the publication The Manitou in the 1970s, and continued by Robert Conley, Muriel Gray, and Owl Goingback.

Although some readers have argued that Cacek here takes too long to get to the point, I found refreshing the care that she takes with creating characters like Joseph, Sam, and Sky. Joseph, a representative of a passing generation, is the epitome of respect for his native Hopi legends and traditions, while Sky, who is two generations removed from Joseph and half-white, is left to slowly realize that Hopi mysticism does have its place in her life. Sam is a different type of refreshing character: he is somewhat one-dimensional in his self-interest, but he is not a melodramatic villain decked out in black (that role is wisely, on the part of the author, left to Sam's boss). The main detractor that keeps The Wind Caller from being masterful is Gideon Berlander. He is the typical "mad scientist" type of horror character--not exactly the monster, but the creature's creator, who is more at fault for his complicity. Even though the situation with Sun Country Homes has the potential to make him a somewhat sympathetic monster, Cacek ultimately fails in this regard because she makes him much too mean-spirited and cruel. He often revels in watching small animals being tortured and turned inside out by the wind.

Yet when all is said and done and the wind dies down, the necessary elements for an enjoyable horror tale--mysticism, fear, gore, and the abuse of power--are all present in Cacek's newest offering. And she throws in a few surprises and some believable scenes of self-sacrifice for good measure.