Finished reading The Store, how about a quick review?

BLOT: (20 Oct 2011 - 12:24:56 PM)

Finished reading The Store, how about a quick review?

A few days back, wrote that I had started reading Bentley Little's The Store. Only made it about 50 more pages before I started getting sick, and sat there unread for a couple of days. Finally, last night, in a fit of insomnia brought on by a cough, I sat down and read the rest. Here's a quick review [in both senses of the word]:

A store called The Store, which is sort of hodge-podge of businesses like Walmart and K-mart and Target, but mostly Walmart, opens up in a small town and reams it. Absolutely wrecks the finances in town, kills off the other businesses, seems related to a few disappearances, takes over the municipal duties, cites extra-governmental contracts that put it above the law, and becomes, effectively, the core of the town. It is a paranoid fantasy of what corporate franchises can mean for America, but not one that is entirely unfounded. At the same time, there are all sorts of creepy stuff—animals crawling to The Store's parking lot just to die, new employee hazings involving torture and molestation, weird and illegal products on sale—that just add to the overall dread of the situation.

And right there, you have the primary failure of this novel. It is not a novel, but a mash-up of two books that do not always jive at the core. The first is a 80-100 page novella, about a Walmart-like store that sells terrifying merchandise and has Night Managers that are only seen in glimpses and weird creepy security guards watching the dressing rooms and god awful leather fetish uniforms and insane ritualizations including worshipping the founder of the store and hints at higher management that are never seen, and so on. It is a good, straightforward horror novel, with enough allegory in it to make a point. And it has some good black humor—at least humor of the darkly absurd: a group of kids come across a videogame shelf full of themes like violent racism and rape, a granny gets help from young associate on what sort of vibrator to buy, and a new mother has her baby taken away in lieu of a missed layaway payment. At the core of this novel are two sisters: Shannon, slightly overweight and kind of spunky, and Samantha, the very trim, very pretty blonde who was always perfect until she started working there. And they work together and separately and give in and pull back from The Store's influence to differing degrees.

Then, you have 250-300 page novel resembling a small-town drama as written by Dick, or Ballard, or Kafka, where a faceless, effectively nameless business not only eats the heart of a small town, but the small town gladly gives its heart away to be eaten, and any attempt to overcome is met with words that always sound reasonable in part but never as a whole. In this later novel, a man—Bill—, his wife—Ginny—, and their friends fight and rail against the store, but find the pressures of life forcing them to give in more and more until finally they have to either draw the line or give up.

The rest of the book is Little trying to convince us that these two stories are really one story and that the fact that the two sisters are the children of the two adults is ample reason to assume the interconnectedness. Except it is not. Little has written a horror novel that, I suspect, ended up being a little too real for him to keep it all fun and stabbings—some small towns really did have their economy toppled by national chain stores—and so the secondary sub-novel, the small-town drama, took over like a cancer and established itself wide and large as the narrative. The original, more straightfoward horror, was increasingly unneeded to tell the tale that Little wanted, and so after a few hard hitting sections, drops down increasingly to hints.

When you start the book, you get tired of the preaching and want to get back to the weird stuff. Eventually you find yourself flipped in stance and you want to find out what happens to the family in their various political and corporate machinations, and you start to wonder why we are still wasting time with discussions of finding dried blood splatter even though the floor was cleaned and waxed the night before. The family's and the town's shared demise are plenty of horrible enough, without hints of dark rituals and strange night visitors. After page 370 or so, the two books twist deep into knots and you start to realize that there is no good ending forthcoming. Not a clean one that isn't either cliche or simply too bleak. Personally, I think Little could have best served his story by ending it like it ends for the real word: a chapter closes and the future is uncertain. Since he is of the school that needs an ending to sell to his drug-store paperback perusing target reader, he pushes on and effects an ending that strangles the life blood out of the horror novella while simultaneously coming across as ridiculous in light of the small-town drama novel. Two potentially great books becomes mediocre in between.

Outside of the obvious, and expected, semi-GOTCHA in the final few pages, there is only one truly mournful note of unease, a scar on the back of the family that will never be fixed, at the book's conclusion. This moment is effectively unresolved, which is good because resolution would be impossible outside of utter la-la land [which the book's ending is already dangerously close to achieving], but Little had handled the situation that lead to this scar so flatly [and dare I say, predictably] that it does not really haunt like it should. Another victim of the two book syndrome, perhaps, since knowing what the daughters have seen and done on the horror novel side of things, treating the parents in the small-town drama as the real victims ends up feeling like a missed note. Ah well. I'd give this book a Meh, sum total, with a general "I recommend" the more we are talking about the first two thirds as opposed to the last third.

To address my complaint from the first post on this novel, Little does eventually have characters remember such stores as Walmart and K-mart. He even uses a paragraph that The Store took after the Walmart model (NO! really‽) twice. That's right, about a hundred pages apart, Little tosses the paragraph back out there to make sure you get what he's getting at. Made me feel better, overall, but still did not solve the book's core amazement at a big-box discount store in the late 90s. Oh well, no real biggie, and so much of its commentary about rich politicians telling us they represent the common man and the way loyalty works, and doesn't, and the way businesses win over the government is spot on enough that you forgive the odd anthropological oddness here or there.

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: October 2011