A beachside house in Florida seems an unlikely location for terror, but it might be time to reconsider holidaying in the Sunshine State. Stephen King frightened the pants off his readers in 2008 with sun, sand and scary paintings in Duma Key. Now his fellow American Michael Koryta (who has already earned a comparison with the king of horror from Dennis Lehane) has chosen the heat and humidity of the Gulf Coast as the location for this eerie and unsettling thriller.
It's 1935, and the devastating Labour Day hurricane is about to hit the Keys. World war one veteran Arlen Wagner is on a train there, where he'll be working on a highway bridge that will "conquer the ocean". But Arlen has a gift: he can see the promise of death in men's eyes. Looking around the carriage, he glimpses the telltale smoke in the hurricane-bound eyes of everyone there and knows he has to get off – he tries to stop the others from continuing but it's only 19-year-old Paul Brickhill who listens. Stranded in backwoods Florida, the pair hitch a ride and end up at the Cypress House, a ramshackle old inn on the edge of the ocean where a sense of "something wrong... hangs in the air like the salt smell from the water".
That sense soon proves accurate: their lift is murdered, burned to death in his car. The local sheriff imprisons and beats Arlen and Paul, trying to find out what they know. The only other guests at the inn appear to be those selected by the sheriff. A pair of severed hands in a box washes up from the ocean; a rotting body is discovered in the marshes. Like the smell of the all-pervasive mangrove swamps, corruption suffuses every walk of life in Corridor County, and as Arlen and Paul, robbed of their money and cut off by the hurricane, start to uncover more about what's really going on, Arlen begins to realise their own lives are in danger. And then he sees smoke in Paul's eyes.
Koryta builds tension deftly and discreetly, with the coastal country itself contributing to the mounting claustrophobia, the "strange bird-of-paradise plants" which "pressed close, their wide green fronds stretching toward the sky in search of sunlight", the endless mangroves, the gathering storm. Even a sunset over the sea takes on a sinister edge, "as the sun... moved at a crawl right until the bottom edge touched the water, and then it was as if something greedy were waiting for it on the other side, snatched it away quick, leaving only a crimson smear on the horizon".
The author wrote five conventional thrillers before he began to introduce a supernatural edge to his writing, and he's adept enough to handle the paranormal unobtrusively: there might be a touch of the Cassandras about Arlen, but once that's established Koryta gives us an intricate and satisfying thriller with a very human heart to its evil. He evokes post-Prohibition America, the grind and the grit and the poverty, with great skill. Koryta is better known in the US, where he's won a handful of prizes, but he deserves to make a name for himself here too.
