Lamia

Michael Gardine

I've been on an eighties horror kick recently. I found a wonderful little used bookstore in Canandaigua, New York, that has a huge stash of eighties horror novels for disgustingly cheap prices. And I've uncovered some minor gems. But as is usually the case, you have to wade through quite a few swine to get to the pearls.

Lamia is told in diary form by a New England antiques dealer who's recently discovered that his ex-lover is dead. Not long after hearing the news, he starts going through odd changes.

The first thing that struck me was that this could have been a brilliant rendering of a number of psychological problems. Our narrator has 'em all, pretty much. A complete bag of neuroses that were just starting to get popular at the time. Gardine, however, seems to see them as affectations to shade his character's personality rather than as things to be explored; he's too interested in getting into the non-mystery of what's going on. (Now, I grant you, it's possible Gardine submitted this under another title and it got changed by the publisher, but anyone who knows what a lamia is is going to know the big twist pretty much before opening the cover.)

That, however, is not the book's biggest problem. That would be the fact that the book is written in what may be the most boring way possible. Works of fiction that take a diarist approach tread a pretty fine line; if the voice of your narrator ends up being dull, you're pretty much stuck. And that's what happened here. The narrator is introverted, somewhat effete, thoroughly neurotic, and still can't find a compelling voice. Pair that with a mystery that you know the answer to before you begin, and you come up with a novel that's just this side of unreadable.