Thought-provoking horror is the kind I like best. It’s the kind of horror that drills its way into your mind and makes a home for itself deep within the darkest recesses of your consciousness, making you think about those afflicted by it and how, in one way or another, it is going to continue to cycle itself across the ages and result in either the deaths or the irrevocable psychological damage of the people it touches. When this kind of horror is done wrong, you get slasher flick clones and film franchises that run themselves into the ground after introducing a bold, novel approach. When it is done right, you get novels like Ania Ahlborn’s fourth outing, The Bird Eater, a standalone novel in which the evil she introduces will recycle itself across the ages, perpetuating its pitch-black existence in a road to hell for those it afflicts. How it is created and how it passes itself along is all part of the deliciously creepy fun of diving into the book, which I highly recommend you do.
The Bird Eater follows one Aaron Holbrook, a young man reeling from loss and a broken marriage. He returns to his hometown of Ironwood, Arkansas, with the intent of restoring his aunt’s old house, a dark, imposing structure in the woods that has spawned its share of local legends. Holbrook is one such legend, since he was taken from Ironwood following the death of his guardian, the aforementioned aunt. As is the case with any horror novel revolving around a protagonist’s homecoming, Aaron’s arrival stirs a hornet’s nest, both among his former friends in the town and in the supernatural force in the house, which has trained its malevolent gaze on Aaron’s fragile, broken psyche.
The Bird Eater is, without a doubt, one of the scariest haunted house novels I’ve ever read. It is most definitely up there alongside Shirley Jackson’s magisterial The Haunting of Hill House, especially since Aaron’s psychological fragility reminded me of Eleanor Vance and the way the evil forces at work in Hill House gradually wore her down to a nub over the course of the novel. Ahlborn does a remarkable job of using subtlety and verisimilitude to establish a sense of creeping dread and tension that lies underneath the summertime rural country in which the story takes place.
What especially sets this novel apart from other haunted house-related works is the way in which Ahlborn evokes the tragedy of empty, forlorn spaces in the daytime, and the way in which those spaces assume entirely different forms when night falls, filling them with the blackness of things seen and unseen. The best example aside from the house is the Ironwood High School, abandoned, gutted, and lying in ruin by the time Aaron returns. The high school, like the house, is symbolic of today’s isolated, small-town America, where there are barely any jobs to support the local inhabitants and the ruin of once-productive steel or lumber mills dot the landscape.
The only major qualms I had with the book was the way in which some characters are introduced, but then find no meaningful resolution by the end of the novel. An example is Hazel, a waitress at a local diner in Ironwood who is introduced, drops out of sight for a bit, and then reappears later on, serving no real purpose in the overall arc of the plot. The changes in perspective were also a little jagged here and there, especially when significant portions of the book focus on Aaron and then suddenly shift to other characters.
Other than these slight stumbling points, The Bird Eater works marvelously well. It is a sublime piece of horror fiction and belongs on the reading lists and shelves of every horror enthusiast. I will definitely be looking forward to anything Ania Ahlborn offers in the coming years.
The Eclectic Post-Dispatch 