Horror novelist Nick Cutter (The Troop) continues his streak of genre mash-ups with Little Heaven, a nasty epic that grafts Lovecraftian imagery onto a Neo-Western foundation, throwing in a cult subplot for good measure. The novel bounces back and forth in time between the 1960s (when three guns-for-hire named Micah, Minerva and Ebenezer get roped into a scheme to rescue a young boy from Little Heaven, a Jonestown-like cult in the backwoods of New Mexico) and the 1980s (when Micah rounds them back up to help save his daughter). The 1960s plot has the three gunfighters gradually discovering the horrific supernatural underpinnings of Little Heaven, while the 1980s storyline is about the trio's reluctant return to a place they've never been able to forget.
The plot borrows liberally from western story beats and even clichés, but Cutter cleverly re-contextualizes them under the doomy umbrella of horror. In the 1980s, Micah, Minerva and Ebenezer have made Faustian bargains that give them enormous, even supernatural gifts with terrible costs. Minerva is incapable of both losing a gunfight and ending her own life--despite her repeated attempts. Ebenezer asked to see the face of God, and his request was granted: "God's face was that of an idiot. The moronic, drooling, palsied face of an enormous infant." Micah, meanwhile, seems to have been given something like a normal life, until a creature from his past kidnaps his daughter and takes her back to Little Heaven.
As might be apparent from the novel's length and complicated structure, Little Heaven is a sprawling horror epic comparable to Stephen King's It. Nick Cutter has a similar affinity for pulp storytelling adapted on a grand scale and narrated with delightfully purple prose:
"Micah had been thinking about it lately. Souls ascending. It wasn't Little Heaven that turned his thoughts in that direction.... No, just the feeling a man gets when he senses the chain of his own life drawing tight around his throat. Micah felt the links of that chain cutting into his neck. And he wondered, idly but with as much feeling as he could summon, how thin a cut it was between a man like Augustus Preston and the man he himself had been at some earlier, rottener time in his existence."
Cutter might not be as pithy as Elmore Leonard, but his hardboiled prose is perfect for the flowery unknowability that characterizes Lovecraftian horror: "When humans experience something that challenges their fundamental belief of the world--its reasonableness, its fixed parameters--well, their minds crimp just a bit. A mind folds, and in that fresh pleat lives a darkness that cannot be explained or accounted for." Which is not to say that Cutter is shy with gross-out scares: "It opened its mouth. Its face split in half, pulling its head apart; the top of its skull levered back like a Pez dispenser." The novel even includes grotesque illustrations perversely reminiscent of the charming sketches commonly found in 19th-century classics. Cutter knows horror, and he nails the basics well enough to support ambitious plotting and refreshing genre experimentation. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books
Shelf Talker: Little Heaven is a horror epic mashed up with a neo-western about hardened mercenaries encountering supernatural evil on their mission to save a child from a dangerous cult.