Clementine's Awakening - A Debut From a Fresh New Voice in Horror
Savannah is a city whose story has largely been told. The siege of Savannah: Colonel Arthur Dillon’s doomed attempt at reclaiming the port from British occupiers occurred 242 years ago. One of the nation’s deadliest recorded storms: The Sea Islands hurricane, rushed through boulevards of cobblestone and macadam, injuring thousands over a century ago. And the Juliette Gordon Low House Museum opened during the waning years of the Eisenhower administration. After Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil’s publication in 1994 (and subsequent film), the city blithely faded from the nation’s central lobe, content in its standing as an enchanting destination wedding spot replete with Spanish moss, plein air inspiration. This may sound glib, but it’s actually awe-inspired. The countless haunted perpetuities that give the city—at least from a distance—its easy mix of charm and horror also serve to affix its allure: the city’s past is so unshakable, it is endowed an acute forever narrative: the city is the story. And when a story is told it is granted an amorphous new status: boundless and rooted in a nomadic, encapsulated narrative nugget becoming, essentially, a shroud. Savannah, despite being a metropolis of over 100,000 people remains indelibly moored to its past, unable to attenuate; its history so pervasive, it’s a ghost with a pulse. And it is at this preternatural juncture of antiquity and force where Jennifer Soucy plants a ghost story of her own: a tale of grace and warning, with hues of the past metastasizing and taking sharp color in the present.
Clementine Dixon, the nineteen-year-old narrator and principal protagonist of Soucy’s spectral Bildungsroman, Clementine’s Awakening is endowed with a few very special gifts, but the first and perhaps most important is her ability to engender empathy amongst readers despite being something of a Mary Sue. When we meet Clementine, she is interviewing for a server position in one of Savannah’s many tourist-catering bar and grills. She is diffident, as this is her first job outside the home; but nevertheless, she is determined to forge a success of this otherwise perilous endeavor. That means despite an initial shift redounding with the sounds of shattered plates and irate customers, Clementine—Clem—remains undaunted and adapts to the pratfalls of her new environment. This is important because the primary motivation behind seeking employment is as an escape from her verbally, if not physically, abusive mother. Clem’s mom, a bull-in-a-china-shop addict who oscillates between ignoring her teenage daughter and viciously insulting her, represents the sort of toxic repressor from whom one can’t help but recoil. Channeling The Rescuers Madame Medusa, she is angry and selfish and—unlike Medusa--brings home an array of morally suspect men who often behave every bit as bad as one might fear. Obviously, Clem must leave.
And leave she does: directly into the beer-soaked belly of Grady’s Pub. There she encounters an array of apparent lost souls from belligerent mean girls, to an attempted rapist, to a cynical yet kindhearted mother hen. However, amongst this dramatis personae there are four, half temporal, half not so much, who will change her life. The first, Tallulah, becomes Clem’s big sister and comrade in arms, defending her from the acrimony of said mean girls while bequeathing assorted life-advice and most importantly, providing her a place to stay away from her mother. The next, Henry Martell, the handsome piano player assumes boyfriend duties while conjuring another Disney character: an affable Gaston. The other two are ghosts: Rosemary, a slave girl viciously murdered after stumbling upon the aftermath of another homicide, and Charles Abernathy, AKA Deadeye, Rosemary’s murderer, who becomes infatuated with Clem, following her in the rather nebulous pursuit of making her “his.” This brings us to Clem’s other talents: she is a medium, able to communicate with sprits. She befriends Rosemary and tries to find a way to allow her soul to rest in peace. It’s a noble endeavor far more dangerous than initially understood.
Much of the story follows the mingling and commingling of these central characters as they maneuver newfound freedoms and discover who they are as people and how this fragile identity intersects with the city around them. It’s fun watching Clem mature from the timid girl at the story’s start to the confident woman taking charge of her future, secure in a loving and respectful relationship. Her compassion for Rosemary, who like Clementine appears fearful and demure but proves herself a warrior, is reassuring and her bravery in the face of multiple threats is nothing short of incredible. And again, despite occasionally drifting into beatific categories, Clementine is a dynamic character who changes and grows. Readers observing this growth will find themselves rewarded as the woman Clementine will become reveals itself in dribs and drabs steadily throughout the novel. A prolonged date-scene which at first feels a bit Harlequin-esque—a statement in no way meant to be derisive—actually paves the way for much of the novel’s second half and serves as a marker for just how profoundly Clementine morphs into her own more confident woman. This, despite supernatural components of the date that shake her confidence.
This actually brings us to the story’s spectral components, because when it goes scary, it goes scary-hard. For the first two-thirds of the book, Rosemary and Deadeye’s stories remain peripheral: never totally gone, but rarely front and center. But as Deadeye’s powers expand and his body count grows, tone and attention shift to the ghosts in the bar. Some of these deaths are as horrifying as anything Clive Barker or Harlon Ellison or Poppy Z. Brite could conjure: they are, in fact gruesome. And they are scary. Savannah may be perpetually haunted, but there is a difference between a ponderous sense of past and a murderous one, which Soucy splits masterfully. The book’s denouement is packed with seances, slayings and ghostly possession. It’s a lot to take in, but Soucy never lets the plot get ahead of her as she guides action adroitly to a head. The end of the novel is nothing less than bone-chilling.
Throughout the story, Savannah itself functions as something of a tangential character—or if not a character, an ethos, a feeling. In a city where, as Clem states, “ghost stories are an easy sell”, spirits are never far away: whether these are the matchless apparitions of our own first-person narratives, or the more universal heft of a shared national history. As Clem reminds us, “everywhere in the South, we were haunted by the Civil War. Even in Savanah, it was a constant reminder of what was lost and what was gained.” With that said, it’s challenging to accept that the novel could have worked as uniquely in any other location.
Shortly after the initial encounter with Rosemary Clem, while pondering the slave girl’s fate muses, “My city survived—whole, but not unscathed.” It’s a moment of clarity in a novel where events are often murky. But at its close one cannot help but reflect on its meaning and whether anything that survives ever really remains fully whole. The novel excels at laying the diaphanous prism of history over the film of today, practically daring us to find shafts of luminosity. Sometimes we do. But often, we don’t. And it seems Clem knows this as she ruminates further: “Poor, forgotten girl…lost forever within the most ignoble passages of Savannah’s history. Had anyone grieved her loss?”
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