A Leak In The Safe

It’s well known that I’m an unapologetic true crime afficionado, and one of my (oh, so many) stock lines is you couldn’t make this stuff up, which is my flip way of expressing that a good true crime writer, by sticking to the facts, is able to present a truer vision of at least a certain, undeniable facet of human nature than the fiction writer who cannot help sentimentalizing or conceptualizing their dramatization of crime. What some people do really makes you question what it means to be human.

Which brings me to Taylor Helzer, the subject of Claire Booth’s excellent 2008 true crime book The False Prophet. Taylor was a promising youth, charismatic and lauded in his Mormon community for his ability to quote passages of The Book of Mormon and his enthusiasm for the religion. Yes, the boy would go far and might even become a prophet in sixty or so years. Unfortunately, the fact that real leadership and power are reserved for the geriatric grated on Taylor’s exalted sense of self, and he broke away to found his own little world beyond good and evil. The Latter Day Saints are a newer religion than most, with a prophetic tradition fresher than that of traditional Christianity. You haven’t been able to say God talked to you in mainstream society without getting burned at the stake or put in a nuthouse since the time of Jesus’s disciples, but not only did God tell the Mormon founding fathers to do some pretty kooky things fairly recently, but the old boys at the main temple evidently still have a hot line to the Big Guy. Taylor wanted some of that unconditional credibility now rather than later, but he was only able to get his perpetually second fiddle brother and a friendless loser to really buy into his divinity and the hair brained schemes the Spirit was revealing to him. As in many cults the small failures merely inspired Taylor to up the ante until they were murdering and dismembering in the name of God, not to mention dollars, a few million of which would allow The Children of Thunder (as they called themselves) to really bring peace and love to mankind – the ones they hadn’t killed, presumably.

Anyhow, like I said, you couldn’t make this stuff up, and Claire Booth lays it all out clearly and without a lot of cant. Here’s some of the choicest, grossest passages, followed by the inspired words of Taylor Helzer himself:

“Spirit says you get to know this isn’t a dream,” Taylor said. And then he slit Selina’s throat. The only sound in the bathroom was the air hissing out of her windpipe. He pushed her under the water. Her dark hair rose in a watery cloud around her face as the hissing slowly stopped.

Then he fished out a piece of flesh and dangled it from the tip of his finger. He had been interested for some time in what exactly his dogs would eat. Now was the perfect opportunity to find out. He called Jake the rottweiler over and showed him the tattoo he had cut from Selina’s shoulder. He coaxed the dog to eat the piece of skin as Dawn watched.

Anything Dawn had done, she did after consultation with Taylor the prophet and with the approval of Jesus Christ. She was surrounded that very moment by a band of angels.

Judging whether belief in a prophet is a delusion or simply religious faith can be a tricky thing. The mental-health field has made obvious allowances for major world religions; doctors cannot go around finding every Christian, Muslim or Jew crazy simply because they believe that God has spoken through a chosen few. So when does faith cross the line to insanity?

– Claire Booth

MOMMA, I AM NOT ASHAMED THAT I AM IN CONSTANT COMMUNICATION WITH THE LORD AND HIS ANGELS AND I DO NOT NEED YOU TO TRY TO HELP ME BY BEING DISHONEST ABOUT THESE THINGS.

I’ve been shown to only focus on the Lord’s will and not get caught up in the dramas of the 3^rd dimension.

– Taylor Helzer

I ordered Fall for myself from my book rep because I’m a sucker for prep school stories, but it turned out to be one of those "literary" mysteries that fail at both ends of the hybrid, and it literally gave me a headache just to finish its gimmicky, pretentious, inconclusive ass. I could go on and one (like the author did), but there’s no percentage in flogging the obviously stillborn, is there?

Still, even the most obtuse literary gent seems to be able to come up with a few memorable sentences, and I share Colin’s best with you, gentle reader:

In Canada you can’t go out without shoes.

There’s a million mysteries and the ground’s electric I swear.

There’s peace there in her palm and we won’t have to talk.

She snots a lot when she cries.

I don’t know what to say so I say Fuck.

The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters, Riverhead Books, $26.95.

A lot of Advance Reader Copies come through Aunt Agatha’s, but only a few of them find their way to the "maybe to be read" pile. There’s the authors I know and love like Stuart MacBride and Steve Hamilton, and then there’s the relative newcomers who have that ineffable something that makes me want to cull them from the herd. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters was one of the latter, but it wasn’t until I saw in Entertainment Weekly that Stephen King had proclaimed it his favorite book of the year and (King’s opinion, I’m afraid, not being sufficient unto itself) learning that it had been short-listed for England’s prestigious Booker prize that I dug it out and actually read it.

The first thing I have to point out about The Little Stranger is that it’s not a mystery, but a ghost story. Traditionally in a mystery (think, say, The Hound of the Baskervilles) a supernatural entity may seem to be responsible for the mayhem, but in the end a human being is behind it all. In a ghost story it’s usually the reverse – I’ll leave the analysis of the current mania for a supporting cast of vampires, ghosts and zombies in novels of all kinds to a more subtle mind.

The other salient feature of the novel is that it’s just that, a novel, and a rather long one at that. To me, almost by definition, scary stories work best as stories, and the great masters of horror like E. A. Poe or M. R. James have almost exclusively used the shorter form. To readers accustomed to the eventful pace of the modern mystery The Little Stranger may seem a little leisurely.

It starts off as a kind of Brideshead Revisited tale of an outsider’s encounter with a venerable English family seat and the eccentric aristocrats within. The mother of the narrator Dr. Faraday had, in fact, been in service at the grand mansion known as "The Hundreds," and when he is first summoned to soothe a spooked maid he is treated as little more than a servant himself. Eventually he comes to know the widow Mrs. Ayers and her two adult children, Roderick and Caroline, as well as some of the troubling things that have been transpiring within the crumbling walls. In a the brave new world of a postwar England that seems haunted by its traditional ways, both the house and the family are undergoing a gradual decay, accompanied by uncanny events that are the result of either insanity or unearthly malevolence.

Gradual is the operative word here, but the slow accumulation of detail makes even the most subtle creepy and romantic developments more effective when they finally do occur. I found the last quarter of the book as gripping and atmospheric as any thriller, its understatement moving in a way that the special effects laden horror productions of today (like King’s) can’t manage. The Little Stranger is somewhat hobbled by the deficiencies – lack of pacing and clear resolution – that the "literary" novelist flaunts as badges of honor, but, all in all, it succeeds as an absorbing and rewarding read for those intrigued by the complex shadows of a good old fashioned ghost story.