Mr Shivers - Robert Jackson Bennett

During the Great Depression, Marcus Connolly has left his wife in Tennessee behind and, like many others, has taken to the road, hopping freight trains, heading west. Unlike most of the other hobos he meets along the way however, Connolly isn’t looking for work or for a place with better prospects to settle down – he’s looking for a man, a gray man with a horribly scarred face who has stolen something important from him. He’s not the only person looking for the scarred man however, there are others who have their own terrible stories to tell of their encounters with the man who legend has come to know as the shiver-man, and each are just as determined to stop his progress across the country leaving terror in his wake, and kill him, if indeed he is even human…

Set during the time of the Great Depression and taking place in the heat and dust of the American dustbowl, the period and the location of the Robert Jackson Bennett’s novel is an unusual one for a horror story, yet there’s something that feels wholly appropriate in the sense of death and decay, in a populace determined to confront very real basic issues of survival, in hobos who have lost everything gathered around a camp fire telling their own stories of lives that have been torn from them. Not only does the author find it an appropriate means to express these issues in a simple, restrained, yet menacing style that resonates with the horror classics, but he also successfully manages to give the story of Mr Shivers a heightened mythological dimension that gets to the heart of the nature of revenge, of war, of death and its relationship with America, past, present and future.