Quite a while back, prompted by a recommendation from Bill Crider (I think), I went on a little Stuart Woods binge and read maybe a dozen of his novels over a couple of years. I would read one from time to time after that, but Woods began concentrating most of his efforts on lawyer Stone Barrington, a character I really didn’t care for, so I stopped reading him altogether.
But I remember always intending to get around to one of Woods’ early novels I’d
heard quite a bit about, the Southern Gothic/thriller UNDER THE LAKE. The
e-book edition of it was on sale recently, so I thought, why not?
The protagonist of this novel, first published in 1987, is journalist/columnist
John Howell, who has left the newspaper business after winning the Pulitzer
Prize for a true crime book he wrote. Against his better judgment, he takes on
the job of ghostwriting the autobiography of an ambitious
businessman/politician. To accomplish this task, he holes up in a rustic cabin
owned by his brother-in-law on a picturesque lake in the north Georgia
mountains.
In what will come as no surprise to most readers, many of the inhabitants of
the local area are eccentric and colorful and some of them are vaguely
sinister. Odd things begin to happen. Howell has visions and is visited by what
seem to be ghosts. He gets hints of hidden secrets and long-ago crimes that center
on the lake next to the cabin. Can Howell uncover the truth without endangering
his own life and the lives of people he’s come to care about?
UNDER THE LAKE is a very slow burn, but Woods somehow kept me turning the
digital pages anyway. I always thought that his prose was often flat and clumsy
in places, but he had that indefinable storytelling ability. This one actually
seems a little better written than most of the others of his that I’ve read.
Then, after that lengthy build-up, there’s an avalanche of plot twists and
revelations in the last 40 or 50 pages. I’ve mentioned before that when Livia
and I are watching some movie or TV show that begins to stretch credibility, one
of us usually makes the sarcastic comment, “Sure, why not?” UNDER THE LAKE
reaches the “Sure, why not?” point in the late going. And yet, I have to admit
I enjoyed it quite a bit. It’s different from what I usually read, it’s pretty
well-done, and it might be enough to get me to read some of his other early
books that I never got around to. We’ll see.
