Edenville
Sam Rebelein
William Morrow, 2023, $30
When we meet Campbell and Quinn, they’re inhabiting their “first together apartment” in Park Slope, and their lives are already a bit off-center. Campbell’s a published novelist whose one success came to him in a nightmare, but he’s having a rough time finding fresh inspiration while tutoring ungrateful high schoolers. Quinn’s slinging drinks at the Red Yard, so named because the original lady of the house hacked her husband into shreds there; her portrait hangs on the tavern’s wall. Quinn is fine with this, less fond of the fact that Campbell is a regular at the horror-themed open mic, where he reads the same passage from his single triumph, The Shattered Man, over and over. Quinn is sorta done with Campbell, who’s dismissive and full of himself, but too unsure of her own abilities to leave. Their occasional good moments tend to happen over Indian takeout and horror movies.
Given this mutual failure to launch, it’s no surprise that Cam is vulnerable to the blandishments of a mysterious stranger who shows up at the Yard and claims to be a huge fan. She’s there to offer him a writer’s residency at Edenville College, located about three hours upstate. Quinn, who grew up near Edenville, is pretty sure this is a bad idea but allows her intuition to be overruled by Cam’s excitement at being taken seriously. What they don’t fully understand is that something on this campus is horribly wrong.
In lesser hands, this could be the setup for a forgettable piece of genre fiction. But debut novelist Rebelein, a Vassar grad and Poughkeepsie resident, crafts an atmospheric and wildly imaginative adventure in which something cosmically rotten infests not just the college’s creative writing department but the entire county surrounding it. Renfield County’s exact geographic location is indistinct—it’s near the Taconic but also in Catskills foothills called the Billowhills—and exactly what’s so wrong with it is equally obscure at first. There are bad stories under every rock and a string of mysterious disappearances nearly a century long; locals warn their kids away, and Quinn’s own childhood bestie vanished the night that the pair dared to drive up Billows Road to take a peek into Renfield. Despite the pastoral vibes of the little old ladies running the candy store, the library and seemingly everything else, darkness rules.
Cam, whose overarching ego got them into this mess, soon learns that he’s been recruited because his novel rings alarmingly true to life for a rogue faction among the creative writing faculty who are determined to open a portal to other worlds. Still, he’s not ready to turn and run, so vulnerable to their sense of his importance that he won’t turn tail even after his first spot at the campus coffeehouse mic, when he’s informed that his work mirrors a famous case of Renfield County familicide and he’s taken into the tunnels under the campus and inducted into the portal-opening project. Quinn, meanwhile, left to her own devices, finds the woods inhospitable and the little old ladies distinctly odd, especially after she realizes that the community theater’s most beloved staple is an annual reenactment of that same horrific tragedy. She holds out hope that she may somehow be able to rescue Cam, and uncover the truth of what befell her friend Celeste.
The rancid evil of Renfield County is salted with just enough Catskills to ring true. The history of lumbering and quarrying, the recycled Colonials and barns, the bulletin boards with missing posters amid notices of “piano lessons and plumbing services” evoke an ungentrified sense of place that a casual visitor might not recognize but a local might find nostalgic—were it not for the demonic forces turning Rip Van Winkle’s long dream into nightmare fuel. The campus seems rather ordinary on its surface—lots of venerable brick, a glassy science building covered in solar panels, loitering students—but even a swath of sunflowers has a sinister feel, and the English department—subtly hilarious in spots to anyone familiar with academic mores and power struggles—puts the horrific fun in dysfunctional.
As Renfield County’s scabs are rapidly ripped loose and the infected blood flows every which way, Rebelein is a fearless guide, ratcheting up the tension, salting it with humor. Lovers of horror will lap it all up, while finding plentiful grist for the philosophical mill among its twists and turns.
This article appears in November 2023.
