The Black Carousel

After a hiatus of ten years, Charlie comes back full force with the standard Oxrun formula: four longer stories with a framing story for the entire book. There is a little more interconnection between the stories themselves and the framing story (meant to introduce the new police chief to the peculiar nature of the Station) this time around and some of the ambiguities of the individual stories are resolved in the epilogue.

The interconnection, besides Oxrun itself, involves a travelling carnival known as the Pilgrim's Travelers that seems to setup in Oxrun for the entire summer. It is very well maintained for a cheap carnival, and it sets up on the old Armstrong Farm where there couldn't possibly be enough room for it, but nothing is show more ever exactly as it appears in the Station. Only one of the stories is deeply involved in the carnival itself, the others just use it as a device at some point.

Postman Casey Bethune has girl and yard problems and his visits to the carnival seem to make one better and the other worse until Casey skips town altogether. Or does he? Fran Lumbaird has just moved to Oxrun from the big city of Cambridge with her parents. She hates the Station until she starts to make some new friends for the summer, only it’s sometimes difficult even in the small town of Oxrun to find out just where your new friends live. Drake Saxton, well lets just say he has a lot of trouble finding his way home in the dark. And Kayman Kalb is in the incipient stage of Alzheimer's but he also seems to have picked up a spook problem particularly when it rains, and where did everyone he knew go?

This book is like Ray Bradbury written by Ernest Hemingway. In fact, there is a lot about Grant's writing that is very evocative without using a lot of big words or complicated sentences. Grant's style of "quiet horror" rarely involves much grue and has the feeling of the classic horror story catapulted into 20th Century suburbia. The results are rarely less deadly than his more bloody modern counterparts. show less