Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 21, 1993 TAG: 9311230420
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
By Charles Edwin Price. The Overmountain Press. $12.95.
The ghost of Robert Porterfield has visited Barter Theatre, which he founded in Abingdon in 1933. Across the street at the Martha Washington Inn, a variety of ghosts have been reported. A few blocks away, the late owner of a weekly newspaper watches over the current owner, or so she says in "The Mystery of Ghostly Vera and Other Haunting Tales of Southwest Virginia," a collection of traditional Southwest Virginia ghost recountings by folklorist Charles Edwin Price.
And Abingdon isn't the only place he covers. The "Vera" of the title was the name given to a ghost believed to have been seen at Virginia Intermont College in nearby Bristol - until the real Vera, a former student who was not a ghost at all, phoned from Texas to ask what the stories were all about.
To paraphrase another newspaper editor in the 1962 movie, "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance": This is Southwest Virginia, sir. If the truth conflicts with the legend - believe the legend. Apparently the folks at V-I still enjoy talking about their ghost and they still call her Vera, even if it's not the Vera they originally thought it was.
Price ranges all over the region with his 24 stories of mysterious animals and other creatures, Civil War ghosts and more. He is obviously not arguing for their existence - the book is full of general "It is believed . . . " and "It is said . . . " attributions. But, as mystery and Appalachian author Sharyn McCrumb notes in her introduction, Price has done a service in compiling these tales as they have been handed down as a kind of oral history.
Actually, Price teaches a lot of regional history in this 115-page volume about the communities and institutions involved in the stories. It is worth reading for that alone, whether or not you believe in spookery.
- PAUL DELLINGER
A Brother To Dragons.
By Kent Harrington. Donald I. Fine. $21.95.
A solid plot makes this a better-than-average thriller of the day. If one presumes that organized crime is becoming truly international, and that the American Mafia's hold on things has been weakened ever so slightly, then new alliances are in order. The alliance here is between the Mafia and the murdering thugs of the Irish Republican Army. The Mafia's support is contingent upon an agreement that the IRA will act as a front for organized crime in Great Britain, thus expanding market share.
The believable hero is Frank DiGenero, an Italian-American, grandson of a Mafia don, and the FBI agent who takes on the bad guys. The fact that author Kent Harrington has a long background in intelligence matters adds credibility to the tale. And that's what makes it scary.
- ROBERT HILLDRUP
The Crocodile Bird. By Ruth Rendell. Crown. $20.
Ruth Rendell's mastery of dark excursions into psychological suspense continues in "The Crocodile Bird."
Literally a species that serves as a living toothpick for crocodiles, feeding from the crocs' teeth and living to tell the tale, the novel's metaphorical crocodile bird is 16-year-old Liza Beck. Liza has been living in symbiotic relationship with her strangely _ and dangerously _ eccentric mother, Eve, and is now telling the tale.
The details unfold in a two-track narrative. Liza is struggling to cope with an outside world for which her reclusive upbringing has left her unevenly (to say the least) prepared. Alternating with this story of the present is the story of Liza's past life with Eve. Liza unveils a new revelation each night, Scherehezade-like, to her boyfriend Sean.
As in other Rendell novels, "The Crocodile Bird" is infused with a sense of place. Shrove House, the isolated English mansion whose gatehouse was home to Liza and Eve, is as much a central character as any of the people.
But the power of Shrove House does not ultimately stem - as it might in, say, a Stephen King story - from the estate's own grotesquerie. It is always clear that the power of place stems ultimately from the meaning that humans breathe into it. For Eve, Shrove House was everything; for Jonathan Tobias, the wealthy owner who also had grown up on the estate, merely a property worth only an occasional visit.
Rendell's close attention to setting notwithstanding, in other words, the object of Rendell's exploration is not of the physical or natural environment surrounding her characters, but of the recesses of the human psyche. "The Crocodile Bird" is all the more chilling for it.
- GEOFF SEAMANS
Dead Man's Island.
By Carolyn G. Hart. Bantam $19.95.
Carolyn Hart's newest novel, "Dead Man's Island" has more depth than her series of "Death on Demand" mysteries. There is a dark side to this one in her cynical look at human nature. The murder and attempted murder here become almost a backdrop to the real drama, the reactions of a diverse group of people to their almost certain death.
Hart's "detective" is a seasoned journalist named Henrie O for Henriette O'Dwyer Collins. An old flame she hasn't seen for 40 years begs Henrie to visit him on his exclusive island off the coast of South Carolina. Chase Prescott has built a publishing empire, but not without making enemies. He wants Henrie on the scene because he has had a narrow escape from a murder attempt and wants her to find out who tried to poison him. Anyone with a motive has been invited to the island mansion: his young wife who's obsessed with her much older husband, his do-gooder son who wants his father's empire to help the homeless, his young and reckless step-son, a sharp-tongued actress who wants Chase to finance her come-back attempt, an ambitious co-worker, Chase's attorney, one flunky and three servants.
Another killer threatens them as a violent storm hits the island and traps them all. The suspects react to it in surprising and very personal ways. Hart's description of the storm's destructive progress is vivid, immediate and frightening. It takes the novel beyond the usual formula mystery.
-ANNA WENTWORTH
\ Paul Dellinger reports on Southwest Virginia for this newspaper\ Robert Hilldrup is a Richmond writer and former newspaperman.\ Geoff Seamans writes editorials for this newspaper.\ Anna Wentworth also reviews books and plays for WVTF-FM.
by CNB