The Soft Whisper of the Dead - Charles L. Grant

I haven’t forgotten that Halloween is coming up and that I usually read at least a little horror fiction at this time of year. I’ve read a few novels by Charles L. Grant over the years and enjoyed them. He wrote mostly what some people call “quiet horror”, which is generally a little too slow-paced for my taste, so I’ve never considered him a favorite of mine. However, I was intrigued by a trilogy he wrote as a tribute to the great Universal and Hammer horror films of the past and recently read the first one in that series, THE SOFT WHISPER OF THE DEAD.

A lot of Grant’s fiction is set in the small Connecticut town of Oxrun Station, but in the modern day. This novel is the first Oxrun Station book set in historical times, 1881, to be precise. The daughter of one of the town’s richest men is expecting a visit from a childhood friend, but when the young woman arrives, she brings some unexpected companions: a giant wolf, some mysterious flying thing, and a tall, dark, sinister European count named Brastov. Our heroine has to cope not only with these vague threats but also a romantic triangle that includes a dashing young businessman and a police detective whose father is the chief of the local force.

Grant isn’t trying to break any new ground here. He’s just having fun writing an old-fashioned horror yarn, complete with some bloody murders, a lot of lurking around, and an action-packed finale. Well, actually, that finale could have used a little more action. I found it to be not as dramatic and over-the-top as I would have liked. Also, Grant has a habit in this book of skipping over important scenes and then summarizing them later. I think it would have been more effective to have some of that on-screen, so to speak. It’s been long enough since I read any of his other work that I don’t know if that’s a regular technique of his, but it happens enough in this book that I found it distracting.

That said, I enjoyed THE SOFT WHISPER OF THE DEAD. It has a nice, playful sense of fun about it, a feeling that Grant is winking at the reader and expecting the reader to wink back. I believe his heart was in the right place when he wrote this, and I certainly had a good enough time reading it that I intend to read the other two books in the trilogy.

This book was published originally in hardcover in 1982 by Donald M. Grant (no relation, as Charles Grant points out in his foreword), reprinted in paperback by Berkley in 1987, and is currently available from Amazon in an e-book edition published by Crossroad Press.