Haunter

Charlee Jacob

For years I have been searching for the book that would compete with Robert Devereaux's debut novel, Deadweight, out on the bleeding edge of Most Extreme Horror Novel. No one has been willing to tread the same path of degradation, misery, and despair. What anguish must it cause a writer (because, as we all know, to convey emotions effectively the writer must feel them twice as strongly) to write a novel of such unremitting, relentless brutality?

Well, I finally found it. Charlee Jacob has written such a viscerally disturbing book in Haunter that even I had to put it down a few times simply because what was going on was so disgusting. And that, folks, takes some nasty material to achieve.

Haunter is a sequel of sorts to Jacob's first novel, This Symbiotic Fascination. Where that novel dealt with the depredations of baby brother Arcan Tyler, in Haunter Jacob focuses on the two big brothers, Vietnam vets Harry and Elliot Tyler. Elliot, after the war, joined a ragtag band of mercenaries led by the brutally perverse Saab Gestetner; Harry, after a quick trip home (related in This Symbiotic Fascination), simply vanished into the jungle, never to be seen again. Or so everyone thinks.

There's a new drug on the Cambodian streets called Soma. One dose will do you. After you take it, you spend a while in screaming hysterics, seeing the very bowels of hell. But after that, you become a being of radiant happiness, one whose contentment literally shines. And you stay that way for the rest of your natural life. The only problem is, it's really annoying the rest of Cambodia's drug lords. So, armed with only a supplier's name, the biggest of them hires Gestetner and his mercs to find the source of the Soma and either appropriate it or stamp it out. They find, however, a lot more than just a drug operation...

A plot (however thin) and really nasty-sounding events are not, however, enough to make a book a good novel. What really causes Haunter to rise above the masses is Jacob's use of the Cambodian landscape and the Hindu mythology in which it is steeped to address (and inventively answer) all those existential questions literature is “supposed” to address. You know, why are we here, what are we doing, etc. Between that and Jacob's willingness to spend time building her characters (in order, mostly, just to make you feel that little bit worse when the inevitable other shoe drops), this book comes out a winner. Better than This Symbiotic Fascination, but if you want to get more of a grip on Harry Tyler, you'll want to read that one first anyway.