Word: grubb
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Watchman, by Davis Grubb. The author of Night of the Hunter stirs another sulphurous caldron of horror...
...WATCHMAN, by Davis Grubb (275 pp.; Scribner; $3.95), is the latest of the author's marrow-chilling tales of good and evil, written in a style compounded of Hans Christian Andersen imaginativeness and American Gothic hyperbole. His Night of the Hunter (1954), a surefooted, poetic horror story of two children and a malevolent pursuer, was told with controlled passion. Now in The Watchman, Grubb has pulled out all the stops, piled terror on madness, disaster on helplessness. The book is a mixture of poetic rage against cruelty in man, a song in praise of physical love...
...sweet and pure, shed her grief so soon and take up with her nymphomaniac sister's young lover? Any reader who thinks at this point that he is settling down to a Spoon River mystery or even a variant on An American Tragedy does not know his Grubb. As the story of the sheriff, his daughters and his dead wife unfolds, the murder is seen for what Grubb meant it to be: a mere clue to the piled-up passions and cruelties that...
Taken as a case history of children warped by the self-indulgence of parents, The Watchman would seem like one of the more lurid chunks of a psychiatrist's notebook. But Grubb's debt to Freud is trifling compared with the grotesque vision of evil he has drawn from his imagination. As rape, adultery and warped fear of sex move through the book, tensions are set up. relaxed, and recharged right to the macabre ending. Sometimes Grubb's people speak and act with inspired sureness; at other times they simply deliver bombast. Few novelists overwrite so shamelessly...