A review that originally appeared in Black Static #13:-
Rio Youers is an up and coming writer, who has been praised by the likes of Peter Straub, but on the evidence of Old Man Scratch (PS Publishing hardback/jacketed hardback, 57pp, £12/£25) I’m far from won over. The book is billed as a novella but I’m not sure it would make the SFWA cut off of 17,500 words. Rather it seems to me like a novelette that’s been beefed up to book size by using page breaks instead of ‘***’ and even then can only come in at 55 pages of story. None of this would really matter, except there isn’t much substance to the story either, just a by the numbers tale of revenge in which the only surprise is how the body is disposed of, and even that is too obviously foreshadowed, with just about all you need to know about the plot in the one page summation at the start of the book.
Johnny Gregson and his wife Melinda plan to spend their twilight years in a house out on Sideroad 13. Unfortunately their neighbour, Hill ‘Scratch’ Clayton, is a mean old son of a bitch who insists on exercising his god given right to mow his grass at the crack of dawn, and to run his snowblower at the same hour in winter, even if there isn’t any snow. After six years things come to a head and, in looking for a solution to the problem of Scratch, Johnny gets real interested in the way roadkill always disappears from the verges of Sideroad 13.
There’s a lot about this that stretches credibility to near breaking, such as the fact that Johnny puts up with Scratch for six years before complaining to the police, or that though the Gregsons have three loving children none of them ever come to stay during all this time. A variety of low and high tech solutions are assayed to the problem of early waking, but the obvious never occurs – that if you are going to get woken at the crack of dawn and have no way to prevent that, then going to bed earlier might be a good idea. Sideroad 13 is both light on traffic and busy enough to provide a constant stream of roadkill, and the whole thing with the never shown monster that disposes of the corpses seems like nothing more than a contrivance tacked on to a run of the mill revenge piece, while at the end Youers flips back and forth between the ‘monster getting a taste for flesh’ ending and the ‘Johnny feeling remorseful and haunted by guilt’ ending, as if he can’t make up his mind which works best and so crams them both in.
So what does Old Man Scratch have going for it? Well, there’s the satisfaction felt at seeing a nasty customer get his deserved comeuppance; that’s not to be sniffed at. And there’s some excellent characterisation, so that I felt for the plight of the Gregsons, even if I didn’t especially believe in what was happening to them – the neighbour from hell is a scenario that most of us can identify with. And finally there’s Youers’ writing, which has the homespun feel of a rustic raconteur, the kind of voice that Clifford Simak used to capture so well in his heyday, the amiable ‘all just good friends here’ tone that Stephen King often brings to his work. As far as that last goes, there’s a passing resemblance to Pet Sematary, with the house by a dangerous road, the never named entity lurking in the wilds and Scratch as the dark matter version of Jud Crandall. And so, while Old Man Scratch didn’t impress me much, its author rather did, and I look forward to seeing his work again, but hopefully next time it’ll be something with a bit more substance to it.
Trumpetville 