Stacy's Heart

Background Information

So today I finally finished Stacy's Heart by one Cary Rainey. (He doesn't really have a blog per se, so I'll link to this LJ instead.) Even though I purchased this book when it was first published in 2001, and even though my lovely wife read it a couple of weeks after we received it, I didn't get around to reading it until about a week ago. Why did it take me so long to read a book published six years ago, you ask? I could say that I was an extremely slow reader, but that wouldn't be true. I could say that I'm a procrastinator. Yeah, that's true, but not the point, here. Truth be told, I was afraid to read it. I "know" and like the author, and I was afraid to read it and discover I didn't like it.

See, I gathered from Cary (may I call him Cary?) and others that this book was in the style of a Stephen King novel, and that sent red flags or smoke signals or little beeps... or whatever other metaphorical warning signs one cares to imagine... in my direction. This was for two reasons, really:

1. I don't like Stephen King novels ("horrors!", I can hear you thinking right now, followed by "pardon the pun". I know it's hard to believe, but it's true... that I don't like King, not that I can hear your thoughts). I appreciate King's writing and realize he's good at what he does, it's just not my cup of tea. I still read his stuff, however, and enjoy them to a certain extent. No, it's just not number 1 that worried me, but rather that combined with

2. So here's this unpublished novelist guy who's written a book that might be attempting something in the style of King. Now, imagine writing void of any real talent or style that strives to be like Stephen King. I don't know about you, but I imagine something that just gloms onto the violence and gore at the expense of real writing, and who wants to read 500 pages of descriptive blood and guts with no story, characterization, pace, style, or talent. Yuck. Especially considering #1 above, the fact that I'm not too keen on blood and guts and horror fiction even when it's done well.

So I was afraid to read Stacy's Heart out of fear of disappointment and thus put it off for six years. To cut to the chase (yeah, I know, it's a bit late for that already), I worried for nothing. I really enjoyed the book. It's not void of talent or style, and even if you took out the vampires and violence, you'd still have a pretty good tale in the vein of Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again. And, truth be told, perhaps a few scenes involving stakes through the hearts of the undead would have livened up Wolfe's book a bit. He could have called it then Look Homeward, Demon or something... but I digress.

Plot/What The Hell Happened?

In a nutshell, Stacy's Heart is basically the story of Kyle Crader, successful author now living in beautiful southern California, who has to reluctantly come back to his Alabama hometown in order to promote a movie based on his wildly successful first book, a satirical novel that pilloried his hometown and is both loved or hated for all the wrong reasons. The return dredges up memories of the unrequited love which was at the heart of his self-induced exile (or escape) in the first place.

Oh yeah, and there's some vampires running amok, too.

If you insist on a non-nutshell version and don't care about spoilers, continue reading. Else, jump to the next section. You'll be glad you did.

At the insistence of his publisher and agent, Kyle returns to his home of Birmingham, Alabama, to promote the opening of the film Coming Down Fast based on his best seller by the same name. Some have used this movie and book as an excuse for a series of racist crimes that have occurred, and Kyle finds himself thus being harassed by local politicians and lawmen. He puts up with this because he wants to see Stacy again. He'd been in love with Stacy during high school, but never got around to telling her how he felt. Then, on graduation night, he left Birmingham in his dust for places west after discovering that his buddy Darren and Stacy were kadoodling.

Now, after his return, he hooks up with Stacy again, along with some of his other boyhood friends, all of whom would be right at home in the basement of that kid in The Seventies Show. Still, he can't tell Stacy how he really feels. While in Birmingham he becomes intrigued with Lacy, who evidently is a cutter, someone who gets erotic pleasure from being cut or cutting. Kyle begins his new book using this cutting fetish as his main theme. It turns out that most of these cutters are actually vampires, vampires that are sick and tired of hiding in the shadows. They want to be out in the open. They want to rule over humans. And, apparently, they want Kyle to be their leader. Kyle isn't too keen on the idea, and they try to use Stacy in order to get him to change his mind. Kyle battles these vampires, killing several with the help of some wolves, some sharp sticks, gasoline, and his wits. However, in the end The Big Daddy Vampire kills Stacy, and Kyle does become, albeit unwillingly, a card-carrying member of the undead.

Upon his return to Los Angeles, however, he kills himself by self-stakeification, after first sending off the new completed manuscript to his publisher.

End Scene.

General Musings, or, Hmm This Is Interesting

The book within the book, or rather the book within the book that's already written and is the basis of the movie within the book, is called Coming Down Fast. This book doesn't seem to be very autobiographical to Kyle Crader's life in Birmingham. Instead, it seems to have taken a page from Charles Manson, who was trying to use the Tate/La Bianca murders in order to incite a race war in the United States. Manson wanted the murders to be blamed on "The Blacks" and hoped "The Whites" would rise up in anger, causing an apocryphal race war that would bring about the End Times. Manson believed The Beatles had predicted and were encouraging this through songs such as "Helter Skelter", from which one assumes Kyle Crader gets his book's title. The unintended consequences of this book are a series of race related crimes across America. The racists love Crader and the book, viewing it as a sort of "how-to" manual, whereas the authoritarians who miss the satire intended overreact in the form of censorship and even try to hold Crader legally responsible for the various hate crimes that follow in the book and movie's wake.

There's also a second book-within-the-book; this is the follow up book to Coming Down Fast called The Cutters, that Kyle is working on during his downtime in Stacy's Heart. This book seems more autobiographical, for Kyle seems to more directly deal with his high school relationship with Stacy and their mutual friend Darren . This book is ostensibly about a group of people who derive erotic pleasure from cutting each other, but in reality in appears to be a thinly-veiled account of that night senior year when Kyle saw Darren and Stacy hooking up, and the ramifications that caused.

When you add the fact that the real author, Cary Rainey, also grew up in Birmingham, also wrote a book about his home town, and also left for California, you're presented with a book within a book within a book within, I think, still another book? It's sort of like a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, swallowed whole by a vampire. Or something.

Okay Fine. But Did You Like It Or Not?

The book was more character-driven that I'd expected. Minor characters, like for example the truck stop short order cook and the man running the homeless shelter, to name just two, come alive on the page and are more than just afterthoughts. Kyle's various fuck-up friends from high school are other examples. They fleshed out the story and made it more than the series of gruesome killings that it could have been. You believe that they could be real people. Again, lesser writers would skimp on these details in their hurry to get to the scene where someone gets their face blown off. In this I was pleasantly surprised. And when he did get to the violent scenes, A. Cary Rainey comes through with flying colors, creating the ballet of blood and mayhem that is the hallmark of such prose. Even if I'm not into that, I "know what I like" as the boorish art critics say.

Furthermore, the flashback structure, going back and forth from the present to the past, was used well and helped the pace a bit, though I think there's room for some improvement in this area. Still, Mr. Rainey (I think I can call him that), at least tried; again, more amateurish writers would have just slapped everything down in a chronological manner, and if they addressed Kyle's past at all it would have simply been a few perfunctory paragraphs at the beginning. The back and forth helps create the tension, at least the non-vampire-related tension. There's not only the back and forth between present and past, but also the back and forth between dream and reality. Cary does a good job keeping us guessing at which is which, too.

He uses music to set the mood, too, and in a manner that's a lot cheaper than the way Stephen King does it. (He can simply state that "Living After Midnight" was playing on the car stereo; by not quoting lyrics, no money has to change hands with the music publishers. Etc). It's almost cliched to invoke musical references in horror fiction, but screw it. I like it in general and liked it here.

So yes. I liked it. A lot, actually, and that surprised me.


P.S. One Robert Lieberman did a great job on the cover, too.