Schrader’s Chord
The allure of reading a first novel is irresistible. There’s the possibility of discovering a blazing new talent. Scott Leeds, the author of Schrader’s Chord, displays a facility for understanding complex family dynamics. Indeed, Leeds’s narrative seizes on a “sins of the fathers” motif. The suicide of a father reunites his progeny, which consists of two daughters and an estranged son. Dad owned a lionized record store that he bequeathed to the son. Supernatural horror comes home to roost as part of the inheritance. The father had pursued an urban legend concerning a set of recordings that purportedly open a gateway between the living and the dead. He unearthed the four records and left behind a brief message alleging their authenticity. Naturally, or rather supernaturally, curiosity triumphs over rationality. This is a literary given. I did wonder if author Leeds’s take on the Pandora’s Box myth could offer up something unusual. And if there would be a fresh spin on the malignant music theme. The novel, to borrow song lyrics from the Beatles’ “Day Tripper,” “took me halfway there.” For roughly the first 200 pages of the book, Leeds’s prose kept me engrossed. It introduced and fleshed out a quirky cast of characters who exhibit gallows’ humor and introspective sensibilities. The atmosphere is splendid; the record store ambience is particularly well rendered. Punchy dialogue peppered with banter about bands, songs, and vintage vinyl is delightful. But the novel’s second half is less impressive. It is reminiscent of the conventional expectations about a 45 RPM record, Side A rocks. Side B is seldom a breakthrough hit.
To accentuate the positives, here is a lyrical passage about the initial sensations a character experiences upon playing one of the cursed recordings: “All at once, his mind was a dazzling, baroque web of crisscrossing emotions—all of them spectacular. He felt the electric excitement of a child who’d just woken up and realized it was Christmas morning; the fluttering sense of vertigo a teenager experiences upon receiving their first kiss; the comfort and coziness of a boy up past his bedtime, sitting at the top of the stairs as he listened to the adults down in the living room talk and clink glasses and play cards; the intoxicating rush of climbing out the window and spiriting away into the darkness with his friends, the night ahead of them filled with laughter and discovery and endless possibilities.”
Such euphoria is, of course, temporary. This is a horror story, after all: “Charlie felt his body go limp. The moldering hands squeezed his head like a vise, and all at once, every memory he’d ever made came crashing into his mind like a thunderous rogue wave. Images of his own life, his own experiences, whipped past his eyes at a dizzying speed like demon-possessed microfiche. Every face he’d ever met, every voice he’d ever heard spoke at once. Every feeling he’d ever experienced, he now experienced simultaneously.” This description of a merciless onslaught of the senses is quite potent.
For those who play the records, seeing the dead is an unwanted by-product. The young woman who works at the record store has a particularly unnerving encounter: “The corpse floated weightlessly, almost above the water. Her black, gelatinous hair clung to her head like seaweed, and she was incredibly thin—with skin like soiled tissue paper that stretched across her bones. Blue varicose veins crawled up her thighs like earthworms, and the skin around her lips was red and patchy.” The quotation gets bonus points for incorporating three nice similes. Varicose veins and earthworms present a particularly striking image.
Now for the Side B analogy. The second half of the novel in general has an odd pacing: it seems to rush in some places while being sluggish in others. Plus, the plot falls into the trap of escalation of action scenes. Increasingly outlandish scenarios cause ruptures in plot flow. For example, a car crash is turned into a hippodrome from hell when a trailer full of horses is involved. While the premise of any horror narrative requires suspension of belief, there needn’t be scenes that stick out as preposterous because of the notion that bigger is better or perhaps more cinematic. Which is akin to the offensively pervasive notion that extensive implementation of CGI makes a movie more exciting.
The novel’s denouement is ironic and surprising. What happens to one of the characters is jolting. That doesn’t quite iron out the wrinkles of the book’s second half but does get credit for being unexpected and imaginative. Schrader’s Chord, published by Nightfire, didn’t assiduously have me “Shakin’ All Over.” But Scott Leeds’s debut still leaves me “Wishin’ and Hopin’” to read the author’s next work.
