Fri 27 Dec 2019
Archived Horror Fiction Review: C. L. GRANT – The Hour of the Oxrun Dead.
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Science Fiction & Fantasy[3] Comments
C. L. GRANT – The Hour of the Oxrun Dead. Oxrun Station #1. Doubleday, hardcover, 1977. Popular Library, paperback, 1979; To, paperback, 1987.
According to what you may have read in recent fiction, New England must be full of towns such as this: peacefully serene in the daytime, but once after dark, horribly vulnerable to supernatural forces that can swallow them up overnight, with none of the inhabitants any the wiser.
In Oxrun Station, only two people are aware that anything is wrong, and both are newcomers, one an assistant librarian recently widowed under strange circumstances.
This is Gothic horror at its finest. Half of it is unmitigated nonsense, but if you’re the sort of person who believes that there may be unexplained things that inhabit graveyards at midnight, the other half will have you double-checking the locks on your doors before going to bed.
Guaranteed.
The Oxrun Station novels —
The Hour of the Oxrun Dead (1978)
The Last Call of Mourning (1979)
The Sound of Midnight (1979)
The Grave (1981)
The Bloodwind (1982)
The Soft Whisper of the Dead (1982)
The Dark Cry of the Moon (1986)
The Long Night of the Grave (1986)
December 27th, 2019 at 3:59 pm
Grant was a fine writer of horror and a major exponent of the “quiet” sort of horror. He deserves a major “rediscovery.”
December 27th, 2019 at 4:29 pm
I agree totally with your description of Grant as a writer — another C. L. (!), but ths time male — and to my my mind a lot more effective that the splatterpunk approach. As for being rediscovered, I see that a lot of his work is available on Kindle, which in this day and and age, is almost the same thing. If anyone’s buying them, that is, and I hope they are.
December 29th, 2019 at 6:44 pm
Time to reread Grant.