ORDINARY HORROR

Texan Searcy’s first novel eschews the usual gore and bloodletting of the horror genre, finding chills enough in the daily lights and sounds around the house.

Reclusive widower Frank Delabano, a retired high-school science teacher, lives in a tract house near the prairie’s edge and loves to grow roses (“little chimneys of the spirit”). Prairie gophers have dug holes all over his garden, so when Frank sees an ad for a South American plant that will rid him of such pests, he sends away for it. Soon, four big, dark-blue flowers have spread their stinking fibers underground, driving off the gophers. Naturally, there’s a price to pay. Superficially similar in subject matter to Stephen King’s The Plant, now in its third chapter on the Internet, this leisurely story has closer kinship to Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, which it resembles both in pace and in deep ambiguity about just what happens. Searcy’s more gorgeous moments far outstrip King’s for sheer poetry, but blood-lusting fans may find his horror just too ordinary. Of the plot little can be said without giving away the author’s big payoff—and some readers may not grasp exactly what has happened in the last pages. If they do, they may still be confused about why it has happened. They are advised to recall Frank’s science background and invited to ponder whether a scientific explanation might trump a supernatural one. Searcy pulls off a nice fake-out involving a climactic backyard cookout, featuring mysterious events most readers will not recognize for what they actually were until the finale . . . if then.

Slow, even head-nodding at times, but common details take on an uncommon second life here.