Country: USA
Genre: Horror
Pages: 270
When I was a kid, reading horror was the quintessential act of literary badassery. In high school, if you read one of those thick Stephen King novels, you were the man. You were allowed to walk around with a book without having your head flushed down the toilet. Over the years, as I expanded my reading horizons, I came to realize that in-between King's overproduction and the gimmicky wannabees, the genre has been worn out and cluttered with patterns. Whenever the supernatural is involved, many writers do a great job at hinting on the menace, but many succumb to the idea that a threat is better left unseen. With that kind of mentality, horror gets old pretty fast. Fortunately, John Hornor Jacobs doesn't bother with that. SOUTHERN GODS opens with a direct encounter with the antagonist and it's a big, bad motherfucker. Written in the forgotten tradition of H.P Lovecraft, John Hornor Jacobs' landmark debut manages to scare the crap out of you and introduce a mythology so strong, he could really well build a series out of it.
Bull Ingram is a World War II veteran turned local bruiser, who's hired by a DJ to find a mysterious blues singer named Ramblin' John Hastur. The job seems simple enough, yet the music of Hastur has distressing effects on Ingram. It sends him in frenzied state of rage and loathing and leaves him blacking out somewhere and waking up with injuries. His tale is told alongside the story of Sarah, who leaves her husband to go back to her family's estate in Arkansas with her daughter Franny. Over there, she reconnects with her mother and with her servant Alice. One day, she ends up finding two curious books in her mother's library, which she attempts to translate. That's where things get hairy and her story connects with the one of Bull, who both realize they have been messing with something much meaner than the devil himself.
I have to admit, I wasn't too crazy about the protagonist's. I found Bull to be a little too much like the strong-silent war-vet stereotype (although he had the craziest, coolest dreams I've read in a novel) and Sarah was unappealing to me. Once again, she was too much like the other love-scorn wives and I didn't buy into her vulnerability. BUT, the rest of the novel is shining so fucking hard, you can't really blame it on the writer. The characters are not the show, the occult forces are. John Hornor Jacobs sets ups the gloomiest atmosphere with sharp and original images. He took huge risk's because he exposed his antagonist over and over again, through different manifestation and things could have turned into grotesque or clownish, but it never does. Jacobs writes tight scenes, exposes his threat but doesn't write more than he needs to. There is no wasted space to SOUTHERN GODS, just a tight deadly, suffocating trap in every chapter.
There isn't much to dislike about SOUTHERN GODS, if you're into horror. It's an intense, plot-driven adventure with steep curves in the road. Writing horror is all about exposing the dark corners of your sick mind, but what separates the good horror writers from the great ones is their ability to insert their gruesome creations inside a good story. John Hornor Jacobs does just that. His scenes are razor sharp with tension and his ending lives up to the great story he wrote. As a reader, no matter how good your story is, your ending needs to be better and SOUTHERN GODS satisfied my thirst for a killer end. From the Blues soaked Bayou to the dark worlds of occult deities, the world of SOUTHERN GODS breathes with a life and an identity of its own. I am a bit disappointed that the next Jacobs' novel scheduled is not horror, but I will run to the bookstore to get it anyway. Do not read this book at night, or alone, or if you're into being pummeled into catatonic fear, please do.