James Moore: Blood Red

No book is written alone and truer words have never been spoken. The author would like to thank Paul Miller for his insights, kind words of encouragement, and enthusiasm. Thanks also to my wife, Bonnie, for her amazing patience and love. You have always been and remain my heart and soul. Thanks also to Kelly Perry, one of the finest editors I have ever had the pleasure of working with. Under incredible time constraints, Kelly kept me on track and made Blood Red five times the book it would have been otherwise. For those reasons and a thousand others, this book is dedicated with awe and admiration to the people listed above. Thank you, more than I can say with mere words, thank you.

“Stone the crows.” A figure of speech uttered in exclamation. “A murder of crows.” A collective noun for a gathering of crows. There are more, including the evocative “a story-telling of crows.”

These devourers of corpse meat are found pretty much across the planet. There are over a hundred different species of the crow family, including the carrion, hooded, and American crows, plus rooks, jays, choughs, jackdaws, and Poe’s iconic raven. Some are big and ominous-looking; as dark as black holes in the sky. Several of the species are small. One is even white.

Crows can be metaphor for the horror story. In the best tradition of Hitchcock’s The Birds, crows tend not to arrive in a single battalion. A murder of crows assembles in ones or twos. You don’t notice them infiltrating your neighborhood until suddenly you realize your house, or that children’s climbing frame, is full of the black-feathered daemonic creatures. For me, the best horror stories are like that. The horror begins with a gradual accumulation of off-key details at near-subliminal level in an otherwise harmonious environment. The reader outside the book—and the hero inside the covers—doesn’t realize that anything is seriously amiss until it’s too late.

That’s why horror is subversive. It infiltrates the reader’s mind before it launches its attack. Sit with friends and discuss favorite horror movies and stories. A goodly bunch of those mentioned will feature an everyday, safe environment. Or what should be a safe environment. The home for instance. How many horror stories begin with the hero and family moving house to a new home only to find they hear footsteps on the stairs at the dead of night, or the lavatory inexplicably flushing? Psychologists will admit that the home and the self are inextricably linked. So the notion of your house being invaded or haunted by a ghost is, in effect, a metaphor for an invasion or haunting of one’s mind. And one thing our culture teaches us is this: what should be our one safe place in the world—our home—is hideously vulnerable to supernatural attack. As children, didn’t we fear the monster under the bed? Ghosts are already in the woodwork. Vampires, zombies, and assorted ghouls soon find a way across the threshold (heck, even those starlings in The Birds … remember the gush of our feathered friends down the chimney?). And it doesn’t matter whether you’re playwright-turned-caretaker in a swanky mountain hotel or a man of God. They’re coming to get you.

Case in point: in 1715, the Reverend Samuel Wesley, father of John Wesley, one of the founders of the Methodist Church, experienced a poltergeist infestation at their home, the Epworth Rectory in England. At night he and his family were alarmed to hear groans and weird howling from the attic, accompanied by frenzied banging. Frequently, he was woken at night by what sounded like torrents of coins cascading onto the floor and the crash of breaking bottles. But when he investigated, he found nothing visibly amiss. Members of the household glimpsed a strange figure in white. His children eventually called the specter Old Jeffrey. See, no one’s safe.

Nor are the inhabitants of the peacefully affluent Black Stone Bay, Rhode Island, in Blood Red . Oh, they think they’re in no danger, but just as the crows settle unnoticed one by one on their houses, a sinister infiltration has already begun in Black Stone Bay.

In this novel of James A. Moore’s you’re going to encounter crows aplenty, and that’s as much of the plot as I’m giving away. Of course, I can let other things slip… Quick! While the publisher’s out of the room! Come close and listen:

Blood Red is a beautifully written horror novel. The easy-going loquacious style is deceptive. Take it from me: anything that reads so well, with such attention to detail, is damnably hard to write. This prose style is the product of years of hard work, of staying home with the blinds shut when everyone else is out having fun in the sunshine. James A. Moore has paid his dues, honed his craft, and now the delight is all yours in reading a powerful and witty story, which opens in the elegantly tantalizing way that is the mark of exceptional talent. Pun intended but there’s a rich vein of humor here as well as horror. Despite the carnage of the climax, the ending is genuinely poignant, too. And as you read, you’re forgiven if you exclaim more than once “Stone the crows!” It’s a kind of book that unveils surprise after surprise.

There are those who have and those who do not. The majority of Black Stone Bay, Rhode Island, had it in abundance. Along the shoreline that looked out over the Atlantic Ocean, a long run of mansions stood at attention or sprawled across their massive lawns, regarding the world with blind glass eyes that hid treasures most people would have thought excessive in the extreme. In the summertime, the bay ran thick with yachts and luxury sailboats, with a few smaller speedboats just to add a little balance.

The land could easily have accommodated a hundred times as many houses, but most of the people in town would never allow that to happen. A few had tried to change the minds of the people in power. They had all failed.

Of course, not everyone in the town was disgustingly wealthy; it just looked that way to the uninitiated. Someone had to serve those who ruled and it would hardly be convenient if the hired help had to drive for several hours to get to work. The flow of tourists that poured into Black Stone Bay to see the sights, eat at the numerous restaurants, and blow their money was as large as would be anticipated in any town that had ample seaside views and spacious hotels. That was to be expected, during the summer at least, and sometimes even in the fall, when the leaves changed.

And they needed servants, too; local help that could be hired at a reasonable rate. The town had a lot of blue-collar laborers; it just knew how to hide them from plain sight.

All in all, Black Stone Bay was relaxed and tended to stay that way. The people—whether inordinately wealthy or merely well-off—lived their lives from day to day with the usual numbers of problems and solutions. Certainly the people attending the two universities had their own concerns.

Neither the Winslow Harper University of Arts and Sciences nor the Sacred Dominion University were known for allowing anyone to stay in their programs without being exceptional. The student bodies paid dearly for the privilege of attending and they worked hard or they lost their money. Both of the schools were Ivy League caliber—or “Potted Ivy” as the locals called them with tongues firmly planted in cheeks—and both were acknowledged for their excellence on a yearly basis. All in all, however, the people were comfortable with their positions in life; maybe not always happy, but comfortable.