The Store by Bentley Little

Bentley Little rarely makes public appearances.

The Store is the first novel by Bentley Little that I’ve read, but it probably won’t be my last. It reminded me a bit of Stephen King's books, and I’m a Stephen King fan. The King novel that especially comes to mind when you read the description of The Store is Needful Things. Both are about a new store that opens in a small town, offering a full inventory of Evil to the residents. That’s pretty much where the similarities between the two books end, though. 

Review 

While the nefarious store called Needful Things is a small curio shop, the store that comes to Juniper, Arizona, is a Big Box like Walmart or Target. Like Walmart in particular, the corporation behind The Store looks for small towns that don’t have pre-existing competition from other large, national chain stores. When The Store arrives, it’s the biggest thing around, and it quickly begins to drive the independent “mom ’n’ pop” stores and restaurants on Main Street out of business. The Store also quickly becomes the biggest employer in town. (New employees soon learn, however, that The Store’s HR department isn’t exactly up-to-date on enlightened workplace practices.) 

Protagonist Bill Davis is a telecommuting tech writer, so his fortunes aren’t as tied to those of local businesses as is the case with other characters in the story. A least, not that he realizes at first. He repeatedly goes before the town council to express his opposition to The Store’s exemptions from environmental requirements, its predatory practices, and more – but it soon becomes clear that the council is fully in The Store’s pocket. And, despite his opposition to their doing so, Bill’s own daughters take jobs with the store because it pays better than any other employer in town. 

As the story develops, The Store takes over more and more of Juniper, including the schools, the parks, and even the police department. Besides that, you really don’t want to meet The Store’s pallid, emotionless “night managers” because they have a simple solution for dealing with troublesome citizens who resist The Store’s plans. Without going into detail, let’s just say opponents end up becoming night managers themselves. Resistance truly is futile. 

Ultimately, in his effort to stop The Store’s reign of terror and free his daughters from their employment contracts, Bill confronts the owner. Like Leland Gaunt, the proprietor of Needful Things, the CEO of The Store (Newman King) might just be Old Scratch himself, or possibly one of his minions. He offers Bill a deal: take our training, become manager of the Juniper store, and you can do anything you want with it. The deal seems too good to be true, and, of course, becoming manager of his local Store and virtual dictator of his whole town presents Bill with temptations and challenges that make it difficult for him to hold on to his moral core. The devil knows his business. 

The book isn’t without flaws, including some plot holes and character inconsistencies that can be hard to swallow. But overall it’s a fun, fast read, that lingers with you.

Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola

I recently read Stephen King's new novel, Billy Summers, and was intrigued by the incidental fact that Billy was reading a novel by Émile Zola called Thérèse Raquin. King never describes the novel, but he mentions it several times, as if inviting you to take a look at it for yourself, So, I did. 

Review

If you distilled Thérèse Raquin down to its essential plot points, you could almost turn it into an EC horror comic. Thérèse, through no agency of her own, is married to a sickly, boring young man named Camille. One day, Camille makes the mistake of introducing his wife to a robust, virile former schoolmate of his named Laurent, In time, Thérèse and Laurent become attracted to each other and begin to have an affair behind Camille's back. Eventually, they decide Camille is the one thing keeping them from complete happiness, so they plot his murder. The murder itself is played out in horrific, violent detail as Laurent drowns Camille in the Seine while Thérèse watches.

The lovers succeed in making the murder look like a boating accident, preempting any suspicions of foul play. Since it takes a while for the body to turn up because it had been pushed down into the current, Laurent takes to visiting the morgue each day, hoping to identify the body and help the police close the case. These visits, described in chapter thirteen, turn into a bit of Grand Guignol as Zola describes the corpses in vivid detail. We learn, along the way, that visiting the morgue is an entertainment for many.

Sometimes gangs of small boys came in, mere children of twelve to fifteen. who rushed along the windows and only stopped in front of female corpses. They leaned on the glass with their hands and ran their impudent eyes over the bare breasts, nudging each other and passing smutty remarks, learning vice in the school of death. Young louts have their first women in the Morgue. 

With Camille finally buried and their crime unsuspected, the lovers decide to avoid each other's embraces for a while to further divert any thought that they might have had anything to do with it. They depend on mutual friends to ultimately suggest that perhaps the two of them should get together, which was also part of the plan all along. But each of them has become haunted by guilty visions of Camille's corpse. By the time they are joined in matrimony, each is repulsed by the other, and they are no longer able to experience the pleasure they felt when they were together illicitly. What follows is a gradual descent into hallucinatory madness, physical abuse, and vicious recriminations. The final paragraph of this nasty little novel is a masterpiece of degradation and spite that would, as I indicated earlier, have been at home in a pre-Code horror comic. 

I have, of course, left out important developments and characters in this short summary, but it should be enough to let you decide if this is the sort of thing that interests you. I found the first half of the novel to be compelling reading, but it began to drag in the second half as the author prolonged the suffering of the two lovers. Nevertheless, I admired the unflinching way Zola examined the motives of his characters. In the beginning, when Thérèse falls for Laurent, Zola makes it clear that she does so for the physical pleasure of sex -- there's no mincing of words here. Even Laurent is a bit frightened at first by how much she enjoys it.

Reactions to this novel are fairly mixed. In its day is was famously described as "putrid" by one critic. While Zola held it up as a study in naturalism based on the interplay of character types, the novel is definitely overheated and "over the top" in all sorts of ways. Others have pointed out the similarities to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart. While I don't see any similarities to Billy Summers, I can certainly see why Uncle Stevie thought Thérèse Raquin worth bringing to his readers' awareness.