Gideon's Curse

A Novel of Old Mill, NC

By: David Niall Wilson

Narrated by: Cary Hite

Length: 7 hrs and 18 mins

Publisher's Summary

Just after the Civil War, a preacher named Gideon Swayne journeyed south from Random, Illinois to minister to the newly freed slaves. In the bitter prejudice of North Carolina, and the magic of the Great Dismal Swamp, he made a home...that home was taken from him in hatred, and in violence.

The Pope plantation is mired in the "old ways", migrants work their land so they don't have to get their hands too dirty. There are older ways than the Pope family, built on slave labor and mired in their own past, can imagine. Their farm hand, Gideon, has seen his mother's reflection in the slime-pools of the bog. He's heard his grandfather, the first Gideon at Preacher's Marsh, chanting on the night breeze. He has seen eyes, glowing green and glittering with hatred, lining the trees along the fields and peering from the trees. He has heard voices like drumbeats chanting in the night. The dead are rising, and they are coming. Soon.

Gideon's Curse is a novel of history. It's a novel of freedom, slavery, magic, and romance. It's a glance into the violent past of the Deep South and the hope of a better future.

©2017 David N. Wilson (P)2017 David N. Wilson

Awesome horror novel

The framing device of the book is that the Pope Plantation is an anachronism in the modern day. A haunted spooky place with only a few descendants of its former slave lords still using human trafficking, albeit migrant workers, to keep planting even as the woods are full of unnatural things.

A curse akin to the one in Silent Hill hangs over the place where the population continues to labor despite they'd probably be better off anywhere else on Earth. When the last two men of the accursed family kidnap a teenage girl to rape, the terrible curse comes to fruition with a man named Gideon relaying the terrible history of the place to the girl's family. A curse about a preacher who came to the plantation in the aftermath of the Civil War in hopes of missioning to the former slaves and who ends up bringing down the wrath of God or at least his distant cousins.

The heart of the book is the story of Reverend Gideon and his relationship with the former slave Desdemona, who is a sort of shaman or priestess to the locals. It's a love story but the kind of which Stephen King would tell as Gideon finds himself losing his Christian faith (or perhaps expanding it) as he finds himself confronted with the reality of the supernatural. This, however, layered against the fact he is acting upon a empathy and desire to touch the divine which is innate to how the religion should work.

This isn't a fuzzy feel good story about a white man and a black woman overcoming the odds, however, but how something good gets destroyed. The locals don't take well to Gideon, his ideas, being in a relationship with a black woman, or the fact he's organizing the locals even under the auspices of ministering. The idea a terrible thing happens is not a spoiler as we know it will happen but how it does is extremely well-handled with the climax being extraordinarily well-written.

It's difficult really to describe what kind of horror this book embodies since it's a kind of weird morality play that exists in the penumbra between Twilight Zone Christian morality along with Lovecraftian maltheist malevolence. The supernatural is real, arguably impersonal, and God's power seems limited to how it makes his followers feel. Yet, it is the humans who are the monsters and who bring down their doom on themselves.

I heartily recommend this book for fans who are interested in Southern Gothic horror stories. Cary Hite did an amazing job narrated.

9/10