By ED GORMAN (White Wolf; 1996)
A stellar release from the late, lamented Georgia-based White Wolf Publishing, who during the mid-nineties could be counted on to turn out provocative and invigorating genre fare (standout White Wolf releases included James Lovegrove’s THE HOPE, Simon Maginn’s VIRGINS AND MARTYRS and William Browning Spencer’s RESUME WITH MONSTERS). This novel of “dark suspense,” about “the perils of falling in love with the wrong person,” was published in 1996, shortly before White Wolf shut its doors for good (the novel was reissued in the 2010s by PS Publishing).
The late Ed Gorman (1941-2016) was a master of dark suspense. Even if CAGE OF NIGHT, a conflation of Gorman’s short story “the Basher Girl,” isn’t necessarily one of his best books, it contains nearly all the elements that made Gorman one of America’s premiere genre heavyweights: lean prose, solid characterizations and an unparalleled knack for page-burning suspense. It’s never taken me more than a day or two to finish a Gorman book, and this one was no exception; I devoured it in a few short hours.
Nick Morrow, the 29 year old protagonist of CAGE OF NIGHT, is someone I’m sure most of us can identify with (whether we want to or not): a hopeless nerd who finds himself returning to his Northwestern hometown after a stint in the army. Back home Nick finds that he’s every bit the dweeb he was when he left and, to further compound the embarrassment, his little brother is now a bonafide Cool Dude. Nick forgets all this, however, the moment he lays eyes on the gorgeous Cindy Brasher, a high school senior with a history of mental problems. That doesn’t stop Nick from pursuing Cindy with near-hysterical fervor, much to the upset of her abusive boyfriend Myles.
What seems at first like a standard love triangle, in which the pure-hearted hero valiantly tries to save the woman he loves from her scumbag BF, takes on a different hue entirely as Nick comes to suspect that Cindy is controlling Myles rather than the other way around. Things are further complicated by the intervention of Garrett, an old buddy who’s now a cop, and wants Cindy for himself. Nick finds himself plunged into a nightmarish quagmire of lust, jealousy and murder involving three none-too-stable personalities.
CAGE OF NIGHT is a solidly written account with an extremely well characterized protagonist, things that hold true until the second half, when a vaguely defined supernatural menace increasingly takes control. It seems there’s a mysterious well on the outskirts of the town that may or may not house an extraterrestrial entity that can drive men to madness, and with which Cindy likes to keep in perpetual contact. Being a lifelong horror fan, I have no problem with Lovecraftian entities wreaking havoc on clueless humans, but found this alien beasty an unwelcome intrusion. That’s doubtless because the novel’s small-town milieu is so convincingly drawn and the drama at its center so compelling, not to mention the fact that the supernatural menace is far too vague to make much of an impression.
In short, it doesn’t seem like the author cared much about the creepy crawly business, so why should we? The darkly ominous/ironic ending is good, though.