Alan Ryan’s Dead White serves up ’80s horror with atmosphere and dread [The TBR Wing]

Dead White by Alan Ryan (TOR, November 1983)

I’m fond of saying I don’t have a to-be-read stack. I have a TBR wing. In that wing, a space actually somewhere between loft and storeroom just off my office, a lot of vintage paperbacks reside.

Many of those are vintage horror paperbacks. Some have been acquired in used shops. Some I snagged new off the rack back in the day from Waldenbooks or Eckerd Drugs.

My favorite used shop was a wonderful hole-in-the-wall called The Book Nook, owned and operated by a very nice lady named Lena Cortello. It was a long, narrow space with exposed concrete floors and editions going back at least to the mid-60s.

This was in the Central Louisiana area where I grew up. All of my purchases and reading and want-to-read efforts were ultimately part of my preparation to write myself, and I wound up contributing just a little to the later edge of the horror boom.

I won’t get all the unread books finished before I shuffle off the coil, but at least they’re handy when I have a moment. I’m going to keep working on my holdings, and sometimes I still look back fondly on those I read back in the day.

Dead White by Alan Ryan is one I picked up at The Book Nook probably not long after it was issued. It has a striking all-white cover with a raised outline of a depot and a circus train with a title displayed in a splotch of red that streams down from a train window.

That striking uncredited art earned Dead White a spot in Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix. It was preceded by volumes such as a stark edition of Bari Woods’ The Tribe  and heralded similar covers ahead including Ice Orchids by Elena Yates Eulo (Berkley April 1984).

I liked it a little better that many reviewers across the web-verse when I got around to it. That occurred sometime after I read and liked Ryan’s story in The First Chronicles of Greystone Bay (TOR, October 1985). That’s maybe a key to understanding Dead White.

Greystone Bay is a shared-world series of anthologies edited by Grant in the quiet-horror tradition of his Oxrun Station novels and stories, a style Grant advocated conscientiously as splatterpunk drenched the later 1980s with intensity and gore.

Horror, in Grant’s signature approach was found in subtle if sometimes shocking moments of suggestion. A mad doctor, werewolf variant or cult might turn up in Grant’s small towns, but shadows, mist and hints of things creeping just behind you supplied the real chills.

Dead White is in the tradition of Oxrun Station. Ryan was in the cadre of writers Grant trusted to work in his Greystone Bay universe, and Ryan clearly carried admiration and influence over into his novels. There’s a name-check for “The Station,” in the novel’s pages. White is set in Ryan’s Deacon’s Kill, also the setting for his own The Kill (TOR, January 1982).

And in Deacon’s Kill, atmosphere rules. That means it’s not the killer clown novel you might be expecting from the synopsis which notes that Deacon’s Kill is facing a blizzard. And: “As the drifts creep higher, a train appears out of the storm, arriving on rusty abandoned tracks—an antique circus train bringing clowns…and shadows…and death.

Death takes a while, but the snow’s present in the opening as Deacon’s Kill resident Susan Lester skids off the highway on her way home. She’s on hand to see and raise an eyebrow at the locomotive tugging the circus wagons into the local depot.

Soon, she joins the town doctor, Elbert Warren aka Doc Warren and acting Sheriff Richie Mead in storm preparations centering around the town’s elegant old Centennial Hotel. Ryan uses multiple viewpoints, hopping from various endangered characters as the blizzard worsens and clowns emerge.

It’s a good opportunity to establish domestic drama in and around the storm trauma. Problems also mount as a ringmaster emerges from the train with promises for a big show when the storm’s passed. The townspeople are snowed in more ways than one since the reader knows the supernatural’s in play more than circus acts.

The history of the train, the clowns and other town secrets must be unlocked before it’s too late!

Does the book really make the most of killer clowns? No. They’re more like a presence much of the time. As mentioned, it scores highest on atmosphere with the blinding storm showing shadows alone don’t create fear. A blinding white-out can do it too.

The storm creates a claustrophobic feel all its own, justifying the title and the cover.

It’s worth seeking out as a mood-inducing read as well as a paperback collectible.