HOME | ABOUT | FICTION | INTERVIEWS | FEATURES | REVIEWS | NEWS | BUY THE PRINT MAGAZINE | BACK ISSUES | LINKS | CONTACT US

Shadow Man
Dennis Etchison
Dell Abyss paperback (import), 354 pages, $4.99 (US)
Published February 1993
ISBN 0440212022
Republished in the UK as 
Shadowman
Raven paperback, 354 pages, £4.99
September 1994
ISBN 1854873423
Review by Gerald Houghton (1993)

The leading exponent (with Ramsey Campbell) of the short horror story, the bulk of Dennis Etchison’s novel output to date has concentrated on superior movie adaptations (his fast and furious reading of Cronenberg’s Videodrome is particularly recommended) penned under the moniker of Jack Martin.

Now Jack Martin himself appears as an artist who discovers a child’s mutilated body on a beach, the latest in a string of disappearances that has decimated the local community. Elsewhere, Lissa works at a home for disturbed children – children themselves scared of disappearing, afraid of what they call the shadowman, the man with no face that comes in the fogs that swathe Shadow Bay. And then there is the gang of young boys who sneak around under cover of darkness, telling each other ghost stories until one of their number vanishes.

Although slightly hackneyed, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with Etchison’s chosen stage here. His short stories have always overflowed with intense, almost suffocating atmospherics, and his portrait of this crepuscular, damp, shifting locale is satisfying in its marrow-chill. But against this background he shuffles his players with very little sense of urgency or characterisation. The four main protagonists – Martin, Lissa, Jack’s ex-wife Lee, and his friend Will – are all featureless, given little more than a string of mannerisms and perfunctory back stories in an effort to provide them with three dimensions. This lack of depth, and shifting focus from one to another to little effect, drags the novel down to a point from which it is unable to escape. It’s a mistake he didn’t make in his debut – Darkside – where for all the book ultimately fails, at least the family that form the core are more than sketched in.

Perhaps worse, however, is that for all Etchison has shown himself to be a master of the genre, Shadowman lacks any real air of menace about it. Where Darkside collapses at the climax into not very much at all, at least it succeeds in building a believable horrific core. Here though the book simply flounders on some well considered but ultimately badly utilised scenes, the use of cinematic references – cheesy exploitation and drive-ins – may have been in the author’s mind from the outset but feels tacked on and cheap.

From a writer of such undoubted talents, Shadowman cannot be seen as anything more than a severe disappointment. Until he either returns wholesale to short stories or comes up with the genuinely exciting, potent novel he must surely be capable of, Etchison watchers would be well advised to go back to his two outstanding collections, Red Dreams and The Dark Country and leave this half-cooked fare well alone. •

© THE EDGE and individual contributors. All rights reserved. All contributors reserve the right to be identified as the authors of all works credited to them on this site. Nothing should be reproduced without permission. THE EDGE magazine was founded in 1990, before anything else of that name or similar. The opinions of individual writers are not necessarily those of the editor.