The Kind of Face You SLASH!!! - Day 1: The Beginning of a Whole New Way of Life

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Joan Samson died in 1976. At the time, she was working on her second novel, and her first novel, The Auctioneer, published in 1975, was being prepped as a film. The film, for reasons lost to time and indifference, never happened. Had the film been made, and had it been any good, Samson's novel might not be quite as obscure as it is today. Which isn't to say that it's entirely forgotten: a bathroom/reference volume published last year called The Horror Book of Lists includes a list put together by Bentley Little of his favorite horror novels written by people who, for one reason or another, never turned to the genre again, and on Little's list was Samson's The Auctioneer. Not only that, but later this month Centipede Press, home of insanely overpriced horror fiction, is putting out a deluxe reprint of the novel, with an introduction by crime and horror writer (and Westerns, too) Ed Gorman.

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Reading the novel now, it's not hard to see why some writers and editors in the field have refused to let The Auctioneer die. It's a flawed, but mostly very good, piece of work, both very much of its time, and timeless, and original in a way the modern horror fiction almost never is. The story Samson tells is a simple one, pushed, at times, to frustrating lengths. At the very beginning of The Auctioneer, we meet most of our major characters. There is the Moore family, headed up by John, and his wife Mim. They are farmers, whose home and land is located at the very limits of the small town of Harlowe, New Hampshire. They have one child, a four year-old girl named Hildie, and John's mother (known in the novel only as "Ma") lives with them as well. As the novel begins, they are visited by the town sheriff, a pleasant put sluggish man named Bobby Gore. There has been a severe uptick in crime around Harlowe lately, severe by their standards anyway, which was topped off by the strangulation murder of Amelia Fawkes, who rented out rooms to out-of-towners. Gore has been unable to solve this murder, a fact which both troubles and embarrasses him. During his visit with the Moores, Gore lays out the essentials of Samson's story when he relates two things: an auction has been scheduled to support the hiring of police deputies (Gore is not only the sheriff, but the only cop in Harlowe, period), and both parts of that idea -- the auction, and the need for deputies -- were suggested by Harlowe's newest citizen, Perly Dunsmore. Dunsmore, we learn, is an auctioneer by trade, and though he is a city boy by birth, and general worldliness, he has been to Harlowe before. In fact, a year or so before he moved to the town for good, he rented a room from Amelia Fawkes, and it's her home that he's recently moved into.

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This auction, Gore goes on to say, will need items to auction off, and the Moores give him a few odds and ends that they neither need nor use. After the auction, the Moores are surprised to receive a check from Dunsmore, for a small percentage of the money their donated items sold for.

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After this, however, problems develop, and they are twofold, or maybe threefold: the auctions don't stop; the request for donations don't stop; and in fact become more aggressive, and Gore doesn't stop hiring deputies. In John Moore's opinion, Harlowe barely needs any deputies, let alone the vast number it's accruing. Worse still is the fact that most of the men who are hiring on to the police force are known troublemakers, even functionally psychotic, like Red Mudgett, a man with, among other things, animal torture in his past. Mudgett, along with Gore, seem to have become Perly Dunsmore's top men. But how does Perly Dusnmore rate having top men? He's not an elected official of any kind. He's not even a native to the town. He's just an auctioneer.

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You will perhaps have some sense of where this is going. Soon, donations for the auctions are simply taken, and resistance is met with barely veiled threats. Sometimes, the Moores hear about certain townsfolk having bad accidents, a few of which are fatal. This lends a certain verisimilitude to the threats, and the Moores, for all the anger they come to feel, as all their possessions are whisked away, including their milking cows and farm tools, find themselves completely unable to resist Dunsmore's growing power.

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The Auctioneer is a strange book. Sporadically, it feels like Samson intended it to be a kind of catch-all allegory for the 1970s, especially during the brief and jarring references to the Vietnam War. But just when you think it's going to be awfully hard to tie her existing metaphors to that conflict, she drops it, as if even she realized it was a bad idea. In fact, Samson drops a lot of things, such as religion. Early on, before Dunsmore's true nature begins to show itself, we're told that he plans to open up a Sunday school for the children. In general, though Harlowe has a church, and a preacher, the townspeople seem rather religiously indifferent, and the possibility that Samson intends for The Auctioneer to be the umpteenth "savage"/fish-in-a-barrel critique on organized religion (rural division) to appear in the annals of horror literature seems strong. And Dunsmore does open his school, and Hildie Moore does attend. But we never see her there, and though she stops going because Dunsmore "scared" her, we never know why. And that's the last we hear of the Sunday school. Further, none of Dunsmore's auction monologues ever veer into religious territory, and while one scene in the novel does take place in church, which is now being overseen by Dunsmore's deputies, nothing happens there. It's a basic church service that doesn't effect anybody, or the novel, one way or the other.

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No, what Samson really seems to have her eye on is gentrification, of the rural rather than the urban sort. It's clear very early on that the whole point of Dunsmore's scheme is to drive Hawthorne's current citizens out, by any means necessary, so that other, better-heeled folks can swoop in. If this idea sounds insufficiently horrific, in genre terms, and more of a satirical conceit, you should remember that satire is, for better or worse, a fairly common element of horror, and, in any case, The Auctioneer isn't in any way funny, nor is it intended to be. It's meant to be plainly sinister, and mournful of the death of a certain way of life, as well as angry over the apathy towards the displaced (the world over, I should add, and not just in rural America. Hence the nods to Vietnam. But mainly rural America). That apathy can be felt not just by distant observers, Samson seems to be saying, but by those being displaced, as well, because in her novel John Moore shows a distrust of Dunsmore very early on, a distrust that only grows exponentially, but he only manages to force himself to do anything about his situation until near the book's end.

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The Auctioneer is a frustrating but oddly propulsive novel. Moore's inaction can make you want to tear out your hair, but this is clearly part of what Samson's going on about. At the same time, this very inaction can rob the story of any momentum, until Dunsmore demands something even more outrageous. Which he always does, and pretty soon the auctions are selling things that cross a line far behind personal possessions and milking cows. I'll tell you, speaking of this book being weird: eventually, Dunsmore is auctioning off children, which is a possibility you might have your eye on well in advance. So this puts Hildie Moore in jeopardy, which John and Mim Moore take quite seriously, teaching little Hildie how to hide any time a car pulls up to the house. But the threat of Hildie being taken is all Samson ever writes about. There is no point where someone actually comes after her. This, to me, is an odd choice for a writer to make, if the writer wishes to build a sense of helpless terror and dread. I'm not saying it's a bad choice, mind you -- just an odd one.

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Overall, there's a sense that The Auctioneer isn't interested in paying off anything in a traditional way, and it does have a hell of a nice last line, as well. And, as I said, it's oddly propulsive; though for much of the book John appears only able to talk a big game about fighting back, I was still weirdly compelled to read about it. Meanwhile, apart from its central theme, Samson's points, such as they are, are scattered around and diffuse. But The Auctioneer still carries an undeniable power, which -- though I really don't wish to overstate things -- has a whiff of the same kind of hopelessness that Kafka sometimes trafficked in. Okay, let's not go nuts, but I'm just saying that I think I see where Samson was going with this. It's a terrible shame she was only allowed to go this far.