The Devil Walks on Rural Roads

Ania Ahlborn, The Devil Crept In: A Novel

Young Stevie Clark has watched enough cop dramas to know a lackluster investigation when he sees one. Police in Deer Valley, Oregon, aren’t taking Jude Brighton’s disappearance seriously. As Jude’s cousin and best friend, Stevie decides to pursue the case himself. Retracing Jude’s steps, he finds a monster lurking on Deer Valley’s periphery. But poor, tongue-tied, neurodivergent Stevie can’t make anyone take his warnings seriously.

This is my second Ania Ahlborn novel, and I wonder whether it’s too early to identify a pattern. Ahlborn takes familiar horror boilerplates, and revisits them from another angle. This time, Ahlborn spotlights a joyless small town, a dysfunctional family, and a community that doesn’t need to bury its secrets, because it hasn’t accepted that it even has any. If this sounds familiar, these are the Lego blocks Stephen King regularly builds with.

Initially, Stevie’s investigation more resembles mystery than horror. Disgusted with Deer Valley’s shrugging, nonchalant investigation, Stevie seeks answers himself. Notwithstanding his sighting a monster, Stevie’s story has more personal drama than out-and-out terror. As we follow Stevie’s parallel investigation, though, we discover facts about his relationship with Jude. The two pre-adolescents seem less friends, more trauma-bond survivors.

Stevie resembles King’s frequent child protagonists: preternaturally bright, but surrounded by authority figures too entrenched to heed his warnings. He’s also, despite his intelligence, an unreliable narrator, plagued with echolalia and visual delusions. That enables Stevie’s abusive stepfather and willfully blinkered mother (two other King standards) to discount Stevie’s warnings, even when the mystery starts penetrating their house and family.

Behind this front-story, another narrative unfolds. Rosie Alexander believes herself unloved and unlovable, especially when she miscarries immediately before her husband’s fatal accident. She retreats inside her rural cottage, just her and the secret she cannot let anyone else discover. Rosie shares her house with a slavering creature of appetite, a carnivorous hungry ghost she cannot kill, because in her twisted way, she loves it.

Deer Valley binds Stevie’s and Rosie’s stories together (though they unfold asynchronously). It’s a melancholy community, a graveyard of hope where nothing happens and everyone is doomed to disappointment, despite apparently being fairly populous and having a picturesque downtown full of people. Nobody in Deer Valley keeps pets, despite the numerous feral cats. Nobody talks about the future, because apparently there isn’t one.

Ania Ahlborn

Years earlier, something happened to Max Larsen, a Deer Valley child who didn’t heed his parents. Max’s story is every parent’s nightmare, but it’s also the phantom adults use to scare children into complacency. Stevie has heard Max’s story, and considering that his mind frequently manifests his fears, he walks a tightrope between giving into Deer Valley’s mindless blandness, and pursuing the truth he knows exists, out there, somewhere.

Ahlborn’s two protagonists, Stevie and Rosie, who never meet, and the sepia-toned community they share, seem almost comforting in their bleakness. Their story seems remarkably familiar. That’s because Ahlborn pinches them wholesale from King’s Castle Rock novels, in theme if not actual words. Both communities teem with people merely going through the motions because they’ve forgotten that anything else exists.

In comparing Ahlborn to King, I don’t mean this disparagingly. Ahlborn writes an homage to King’s style and themes, but places her spin on them. King’s child protagonists, like Danny Torrance or the Losers’ Club, regularly struggle with surrounding adults, yet we know, with the clear-eyed conviction of youth, that they’re telling the truth. With Stevie, whose senses regularly deceive him, we have no such assurance.

Stephen King is, essentially, the Beatles of mass-market horror: a commercial force so monolithic, other artists only achieve success by passing through him. But he’s also an industrial product. As I’ve written recently, King’s oeuvre is consistent enough that other writers can effectively create new Stephen King material without his actual involvement. Like the Beatles, other artists could mimic King and sign their paychecks.

By contrast, Ahlborn both embraces and resists this propensity. By writing her own Stephen King novel, revisited from her unique viewpoint, Ahlborn demonstrates that King’s technique is still artistry, provided authors have their own voice. There’s nothing wrong with giving audiences what they want; bakers make the bread people will eat, not what expresses their inner turmoil. But every baker perfects a technique totally their own.

Ultimately, Ahlborn squeezes terror from a subject readers will find excruciatingly familiar: a large soul in a small, constricting world. Stevie can’t accept Deer Valley’s pervasive lies, so Deer Valley must make him fit. We only wonder what tortures Deer Valley will inflict to preserve its myths of comforting blandness.