Book Review: Whisper Down the Lane by Clay McLeod Chapman (2021)
Quirk Books
(This review contains minor spoilers.)
Reader, before you find out what I thought about Clay McLeod Chapman’s Whisper Down the Lane, you must understand that I am an utter mark for material of this stripe. Anything even tangentially related to moral panics—and the Satanic Panic of the 80s and 90s in particular—is hopelessly alluring to my lizard brain. The sheer weight of that topical interest may render me wholly ineffectual when it comes to seriously evaluating fiction that touches it. You’ve laughed at people who put their money into NFTs—we all have—but I must concede that if the Satanic Panic had an NFT, I might spend a solid, unbroken, statue-still twenty seconds considering giving my money to it. Then I would realize I have no idea how to buy an NFT and move on, but still.
I’m not your person to come to for worthwhile analytics and objective critiques of fiction in this realm. I love it all, and will cast aside my begrudged reputation as a fairly tough reviewer to say you should definitely read this stuff because it’s about nonexistent secret societies shredding the fabric of the American soul through the magic of power chords and d20s.
While my childhood in the 1980s and 1990s was never touched by anything as sensational as the narratives connected to the McMartin preschool trial or Mike Warnke’s bizarrely grandiose evangelical crusade, the significant portion of the American population who believed that Satan and his minions were a real corruptive force in American society included my mother. Everything that wasn’t explicitly associated with church (or basketball, weirdly) was viewed with creeping suspicion, if not outright abhorrence, in my childhood home.
I felt the sting of being unceremoniously withdrawn from a 2nd edition Dungeons and Dragons campaign. I was forced to give away second- and third-edition Magic: The Gathering cards that could have later paid off my college debt if they survived all the years betwixt yon and hither. Perhaps most arduous, at least for the seventy minutes that it lasted, I attended a Christian heavy metal concert that my mother won tickets to through the radio because, well, all other music had been banned. Thankfully her Christian fervor only lasted a few years, and I was free to return to the ways of darkness around the time all of the cultural touchstones which shaped Woodstock ‘99 came to prominence. Lucky me.
All this is to say that I come to this novel as someone who was a young person in the residual aftermath of the Panic, and as I became an adult, that childhood confusion and resentment served as fertile ground for intellectual curiosity about the subject. Why had adults, including my normally on-the-level mother, become so abruptly and vociferously adherent to the belief that there were invisible demons walking the streets and seeking to do us harm? Why invent unchallengeable adversaries in what were already tumultuous times? More broadly, why would people with few financial resources give what they had to those who promised to protect them against the most unlikely and least tangible of adversaries?
Most important of all: why would everyday Americans, even those who weren’t particularly religious, be ultimately willing to change their day-to-day behavior to guard against this mysterious force for which there was no evidence?
They did, and a lot of cultural hay was made on the backs of these beliefs. The Satanic Panic touched the evening news and the kitchen table, serving as a key formative fulcrum for millions of young people in both my generation and the one that preceded it. Evil was out there, and even if beliefs about its scale and how it manifested varied a bit from region to region and community to community and household to household, those of us living in the light were assuredly losing ground. Not even Ronald Reagan could stop the Devil, and we knew it.
Billy Brought a Pitchfork to School
Like so many characters at the start of a novel, Richard Bellamy’s life is just starting to come together. He has a solid gig as an art teacher at the Danvers School, an on-the-up, progressive elementary school in a booming DC exurb, and has just gotten married to Tamara, the thorns-and-petals teacher down the hall. Even her five-year-old son, Eli, is finally warming up to him. Life is simple and bright, so long as Richard doesn’t stop for too long or look over his shoulder. He doesn’t like to do that, and for good reason.
Shortly thereafter, on a quiet morning when nothing of particular consequence seems likely to happen, the class pet, Mr. Howdy, gets butchered. Found near the school, the rabbit’s innards become its outards, arranged in a ritualistic fashion around its body, and the grisly remains are topped with a note addressed to Richard’s past. Someone knows who he is, where he came from, and what he’s done, but what exactly that is will take some time to uncover.
See, Richard was once Sean, the five-year-old star witness and figurehead of a 1983 Satanic ritual abuse scandal that saw teachers imprisoned, a school disgraced, and a national freak-out over the supposed Satanists that could be lurking in any American community. Of course, looking back through the lens of adulthood, Richard/Sean isn’t sure how much of it really happened. He recalls being coaxed, sometimes treating the questions of adults as ones to which he had to guess the correct answer. In time, it all spun out of control, and he changed his name to escape notoriety and start anew.
But the past never stays buried, and the dead rabbit turns out to be the first of a series of escalating callbacks to the scandal that defined Richard’s young life. The incidents are all personalized, meant to draw his attention to things he said during the trial, indicating that someone (or someones) not only knows who he is, but the role he played. The bad news for Richard, is it seems they/them want to hold him accountable.
In time, the events move from the school to Richard’s home, touching his new family, and soon enough he’s pretty sure that the entire community has turned against him. Unless, of course, it’s the successors to the satanic cult that his young self perhaps partially exposed and dismantled—could they be those pulling the strings in the bizarre events? Perhaps there was more to it than he remembers. As the story continues, Richard descends into a manic battle with paranoia, feeling the past catching up with him and waiting with baited breath to see how real it really was.
The Devil Is Never a Maker
I like Clay McLeod Chapman because he's always excited to tell his story. There's a pervasive energy in his writing that keeps readers immersed, and a palpable stylistic enthusiasm that just makes for infectious reading. He’s never just recounting events, but always spinning the tale, letting the roots already laid down dig a little deeper into the reader’s mind even as he describes the new growth in the current chapter. He sells his narrative very easily, and be it some trick of his style or Satanic super powers, I never fail to sink into the initial offering of a Chapman novel.
In Whisper, Chapman’s narrative construction is sublime, letting the background and foundation of the story find its place and mature, familiarizing the reader with Richard’s personal history to such a degree that we try to fill in the blanks on our own long before the author finally does it for us. This patience, this maturity-of-narrative really locks the reader into the story, and when things finally do start to become openly creepy, he gives us too many pieces to immediately put together and reveal the picture. Up until the final stretch, I genuinely wasn’t ready to close the door on either Richard simply losing his sanity or in fact being the victim of an honest-to-Lucifer cult. While I did ultimately pick out where the novel went from the midway point, it was more a lucky guess than my own cleverness. I think the narrative remained impressively engaging throughout, and I was none too sure that the anticipated course was going to be the one we ultimately followed in the novel.
There is one element of the novel that bothered me significantly, and that’s that Richard, from about the midpoint onward, fell into the ancient and unfortunately tedious main character self-sabotage of keeping his own month shut about the strange things he was seeing an experiencing until it was far too late. Half a dozen time he could have shared what he’d experienced, nay, even brought a wife or colleague into the scene to bear witness to the horrors and share them with him, and this would have made his later behavior seem far less suspicious once things were out of control.
(Folks, if you ever find that your pet has been brutally murdered, show and tell your spouse about it. Don’t hide the evidence in your personal space and forget about it so that they can find it later and mcguffin themselves into thinking you’re a person wholly different from the one they married. Richard does things like this time and time again, and eventually finds himself at the bottom of a very deep hole, largely because of it.)
Final Thoughts
Whisper Down the Lane is at times a suspenseful thriller, at others a dread-inducing narrative of personal isolation. Some stories have genius plots that even near-constant readers like myself aren’t able to unravel until the author who penned them is good and ready for us to do so. Other novels are most memorable for their masterful prose, achingly human and resonant, with words of spun silk that entrance the mind in the moment of absorption and transfigure mediocre plots into enduring works of literature. Whisper Down the Lane–and Chapman’s fiction as a whole, I think–is of a third stripe, one many readers prize the most: a story captivating because it is told entrancingly, carved out with such beguiling craft that we can’t help but keep turning pages. For any perceived flaws that readers may uncover, the narrative itself remains so exceptionally engaging that most readers can’t help but see it through.
Verdict: 7.8
Strengths
Carries real tension with it
Should keep most readers (who don’t read obliquely spoilery reviews) guessing up to the last few chapters
Well-written characters in an engrossing narrative
Smartly-told story
Weaknesses
Richard’s behavior frustratingly exacerbate his problems
Latter half of the novel meanders a bit
Feels a touch too straightforward
You can purchase a copy on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or preferably, through a book shop in your community.
You may also like: Rosemary’s Baby, Ghost Eaters, FAITH: The Unholy Trinity,
