Synopsis
From New York Times bestselling author Christopher Golden comes a high concept horror novel about a man trying to protect his dead mother’s body from the evil that is hunting them.
Maggie Wise will take your eyes.
When Malcolm was growing up, the local kids made up that chant about his mother, claiming she was a witch. He and his siblings did their best to ignore it. Now, Maggie is dying, and those same siblings have left Malcolm and his sister-in-law Violet to hold a vigil at her bedside.
But they’re not as alone as they think they are. A dark figure waits and watches from beneath the willow tree across the street. Hundreds of miles away, an ancient evil stirs in its burrow under a farmer’s cornfield. Across the country, other buried things begin to dream in anticipation of Maggie’s demise. On her deathbed, the old woman elicits a promise from Malcolm, her youngest child―when she dies, he and Violet must return her body to her birthplace in Shediak, Maine.
From the moment she takes her last breath, before her remains are even loaded aboard the baggage car of the Imperial Limited, there are forces trying to stop Malcolm from fulfilling that promise. Violence erupts on the train, evil preys on its passengers, and once the sun goes down, those long-buried things are coming to make Maggie Wise pay for her past. God help anyone who stands in their way.
Review
Malcom Wise has two days to get his recently-deceased mother home to Shediak, Maine from Indiana for burial before all hell breaks loose, almost literally as it turns out. Maggie kept her past shrouded in secrecy, and when a stranger appears outside of her home in her final days, Malcolm thinks it must be a debt collector. His bother and sister, meanwhile, are estranged from their mother and haven’t been seen or heard from in years, leaving her care solely in the hands of Malcolm and his brother’s wife. As he boards the train to carry Maggie to her grave, he’s faced with the inexplicable and begins to understand the threat of her demanding deathbed wishes and why he, as a veteran of the recently-ended Korean War, has been given the job of returning her body to Maine.
Christopher Golden’s Carry Me to My Grave hit me in some unexpected ways, and I found a lot in Malcolm and Maggie’s relationship personally relatable. After my father died a couple years ago, and in looking for ways to process the ordeal I’d been put through during that time, my mind naturally turned toward writing a vampire story. I’d spent the better part of two years dealing with a man in the throes of dementia and colon cancer and who, in his last few months, let his unrelenting narcissism and meanness take center stage, fully unleashed. When he wasn’t abandoning my mother and I for long stretches back when I was a teen, he’d been verbally abusive, quick to comment derisively on my weight, fashion, hair-styles, career choices, politics, atheism, etc., etc. etc., followed-up with that double-whammy of “Oh, don’t take it so seriously,” when I took offense at the persistent insults. He had a complaint for everything and everyone, and, always the self-proclaimed smartest guy in the room, was quick to demean. He was a very stable genius in his own mind, even when the cancer had rotted him out so thoroughly he couldn’t stand on his own two legs. He may have been in complete denial about his health crisis and his impending death, but he didn’t let that stop him from being his absolute worst self possible. As he drew nearer to death’s door, his ire toward me grew all the greater (when he wasn’t mixing me up with his decades-long dead brother, at least, or spouting off racist tirades), as well as my wife and small children, who he vowed he would make pay for all his suffering. We were a cadre of conspirators in his diseased mind, working, alternately, for the Russians, the Chinese, the Arabs, and Barack Obama in some diabolical, labyrinthine plot built to support his perpetual victimhood.
A few days before he passed, we learned he’d had a son by a previous marriage that I’d never heard of. I’d known there was a daughter out there, and had even met her once nearly forty-years ago. That she had a brother was news to me, although everybody else in the family seemed to know about him. My cousins had been taught at a young age not to discuss these things. I only got to know him and his sister (I hesitate to call them step-siblings, which I think implies a familiarity that simply doesn’t exist) as I worked through probate to handle estate issues. Most of their concerns revolved around why it was taking me so long to sell his house that was in need of repairs, cleaning up his hoarder’s mess, and bringing it up to code, and sending them their cut of the money. There were no offers to help or lend any financial support to see us through his failing health, medical bills, dumpster rentals, and home repairs. Instead, I got Facebook Messenger DMs about the house’s property value that his Google University graduate of a son regularly sent with suggestions of how it should be split between us, despite those estimates not being all that realistic. Is it surprising that I was unfriended by him the minute the check cleared and haven’t heard a peep since? Is it surprising that neither of my father’s other offspring could even be bothered to thank me for the work I had done and money spent on their behalf when probate closed, or that my wife was harassed by the daughter for not shipping fast enough some of dad’s belongings she’d claimed and that she’d gone behind our backs to try and get a larger cut of the money through my lawyer? No. They’re my dad’s children to be sure, and I suppose there were plenty of good reasons why they’d been secreted away in the darkest crypts of familial history.
I suppose it’s not all that surprising, either, that there exists a 1:1 correlation between family and vampirism in my mind. They work hard at getting into your head, squatting there rent-free, seeking to control you and trying to drain you of everything they can greedily suck out. After his death, I got to learn about dad’s other kids, and the joyous surprise of his decades of IRS debt and other delinquencies. A fitting inheritance, I suppose, for a man he spent his dying days berating as an unwanted mistake, a son of a bitch with faggot kids that were dead to him. When Malcolm thinks of his dearly departed mother and the ordeal that’s been thrust upon him by her passing, he says, “Even dead, she can still always make things worse.” I don’t know the last time I related so damn hard to one single sentence in a horror book. I don’t know how many times I said that myself in the year that followed his passing. That was my dad in a nutshell.
I don’t know Golden’s history or what his relationship was like with his parents or siblings (if any), but I do know he gets it. The narcissism, the secrets, the estrangements, the favoritism, the abuse that still occurs even when it isn’t physical or verbal. There’s an authenticity to the relationship between Maggie, long-rumored by townsfolk to be a witch (correctly, it turns out), and her offspring, and the struggle of having to deal with a self-involved parent who spares little affection or kind words for you, and only does things for you in order to further their own goals and to hell with you otherwise.
The vampires at the heart of Carry Me to My Grave are intriguing sorts. Golden’s no stranger to vampire fiction, having penned plenty of comics, novels, and short stories around this horror staple, but there’s a certain wrongness about them here that goes above and beyond the traditional trappings. There’s nothing elegant or sexy about them here. They’re predatory and vicious, utterly unrelenting, echoing works like 30 Days of Night with maybe a little dash of Evil Dead. The head-honcho is Root, named so because he’s been underground for so long that a tree’s roots have grown through him and his skin is roughened with bark and mold. It makes a more interesting visual than a svelte tuxedo and cape in my mind’s eye. For me, they’re also a bit of cancer and dementia now, too, possessing as they do that transformative power to turn familiar faces into awful- (or maybe just worse-) minded strangers.
Carry Me to My Grave has a lot going for it, from its smartly built 1950s locomotive setting to its furious pacing and propulsive action. Maggie’s burial demands and the gang of vampires chasing Malcolm and her corpse across half the country give the plot a ticking time bomb urgency. It’s slickly fast and bloodily violent but, as a more contemporary counterpart to Malcolm, who lives his life one quarter mile at a time might say, it’s really all about family. I just wasn’t expecting to read so much of my own family into it. Now I kind of want to give Malcolm a hug, and Chris, too, if there’s any autobiography to be had in here. We made it through the fire and survived, brother.
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