No fairy story... A menacing tale of timeless and predatory evil.
Legend has it that in medieval times the children of Hamelin were led East into Transylvania... In bleak post Ceausescu Romania, Dr Sacha Marcu, a psychiatric researcher absorbed with the high incidence of mental illness among the women of a remote Carpathian village, uncovers a horrific history of ritual child murder. After the latest incident police inspector Valentin almost succeeds in cornering the prime suspect who appears to elude justice by dying in a plane crash. Local cop Dave Durrant and his music teacher wife Diane seem to lead an idyllic life with their four children in the small lakeside town of Sunny Mead, New Hampshire. All that mars their contentment is the disability and muteness of their 13-year-old son, Pip. When Diane engages new arrival Diep Koppelberg as a therapist for her son, Diep's charm and exceptional musical talent captivate all who meet him, and Diane , her teenage daughter and the two youngest Durrant children are gradually drawn to him to the point of infatuation. Only Pip sees Diep differently. Where others see beauty he sees only ugliness and decay. Where they see benevolence, he sees malice and unspeakable evil. Pip knows he must somehow convince his family of the danger before it is too late, or find a way to confront the threat himself.
Excerpt
(1) The reflected light blinded Sam Junior's eyes as he was at least three hundred yards from the tunnel's mouth.'Son-of-a-bitch!' he swore, braking violently but, at the same time, dazzled. What was it? A security light? His hand went up automatically to the visor to protect his eyes... The man in the photo-chromatic red suit stool fully erect, terrifying, menacing, rigid. His iron-nailed hands, skin puckered and burnt, were clasped one on top of the other protecting the murderous steel trigger finger. At twenty yards, the red flames of his eyes glared, homing in, adhering to the head of his horrified target. Sam Junior never had the chance to see the last of the sun's rays shine flat red off the .44 Magnum. The weapon at fourteen inches, was not quite as long as a flute, but the weight and the sentence it carried was fatal. The two hundred and forty grain lead bullet, chosen so coldly, jacketed carefully so as not to be deformed on impacting the windscreen, punched a perfect hole, as neat as a rat's bit, in the centre of the young football player's forehead. Its high velocity explored his vulnerable brain, sending it spattering backwards out and around the toy box of a car a easily as a child daubs red pain.
(2)The Cosmic Joker had played the best trick in his hand. He has tipped Pip's wheelchair forward, catapulting the boy into a patch of long grass adjacent to the Adams's storm drain. Kiefer Adams and his family, like all good conservationists, had sworn never to cut it. They had nurtured their piece of lawn in the hope it would attract real American wildlife...There was nothing for it but to crawl the whole way to the chalet...He stopped to rest in his jungle-green prison. It was then he saw myriads of ugly insects hanging silently on every blade of grass. They were everywhere...They were out to get him. In a panic, Pip threw himself on, crushing them with his body, flattening the grass. He looked up at the sky as he had done in his dream, and it was dark. Above his head, the tall grass waved. It was like being in a grave. The arch in the sky was like a dark canvas, framed by the grasses. Then, suddenly, stringing across it, came the shapes of reeling bodies, their whirling dull-dark wings folding and flapping. The boy's frightened eyes didn't realise they were herons driven before the storm, only saw the vampire bats seeking out his blood with their needle teeth.
Professional Reviews
Cafe Doom, British Fantasy Society,
A -
My early childhood was spent in Germany and I recall being lifted on my father's shoulders in Hamelin among the cheering crowds to catch a glimpse of a piper on stilts dressed in colourful medieval clothes. As far as I remember the children who followed that entertainer returned home. In Helen McCabe's Piper the tale is deeply chilling as the storyline follows a timeless entity, who may have lured children from their homes for the 1212 Children's Crusade, and more young ones later to former Eastern Europe. The story picks up the outrageous Piper in 1988 Romania. Mysterious and disastrous rituals by young women with a stranger in an isolated community are investigated and the culprit is thought to have died. However, he seems to have re-appeared in New Hampshire, where he sets to work captivating the women and young children of a family. All that is, except a disabled mute teen, who recognises the dangers. Because the novel is split between events in Romania and the US the reader is treated to contrasting yet very believable environments. Maybe the brooding mountain cemetery in Transylvania and the shiny hot Sunny Mead in New Hampshire are clichéd milieu. Even so, the characters grip you and take you deep into their souls so that the awful experience of those victims in Romania travel horrifically, yet more under your skin, to the American sunshine. Suddenly, with the `storm crouching over the lake', the cliché evaporates. Many mistakenly take the legend of Hamelin's Pied Piper as an amusing tale but the dark side with respect to paedophilia, abduction and mass hysteria are in sharp focus in Piper. How Diep Koppelberg, the pied piper, captivates his victims with hallucinations and illusion remains a mystery as is why he chose Sunny Mead. Not that I subscribe to the need to know everything in a book, so such details don't spoil the narrative for me.
Helen McCabe has a keen observational eye and an easy-to-read style as typified by such descriptions as: `(the toad's) golden eyes looked lazy like it had been watching too much television.' I am surprised to find the Point of View so easily head-hopping sometimes twice a page making it more difficult to engage strongly with a character. Having said that it is easy to have empathy with Pip, the mute disabled boy, who has an acerbic attitude problem and is extraordinarily well portrayed.
By far the best scene for me is chapter nine, at the dinner table, where the family invite the new music teacher aka the pied piper. Little did the family and other guests know that the playful flautist was driving them insane. The madness is temporary but boy it is terrifically crafted. Be careful how you read it or you'll find sanity slipping...
For me the book ends at Chapter 15 with a satisfying denouement in New Hampshire, yet leaving an escape hatch open for the future. After that is a kind of two chapter return to Romania, a tidying up process that is an anticlimax, especially considering there is a sequel on its way.
For any reader who enjoys interpretative explorations of legends, this is a must read. (Geoff Nelder, author)
Waterstone's (Newsletter)
An innovative re-imagining of the Pied Piper tale, the novel splits between a bleakly realised murder investigation in present day Romania, to small town America, where a local cop hires a music therapist for his disabled son. The two strands are equally as horrific in their own way, and crossover with some invention. Hard to believe this is the author's first attempt at the horror genre, as she tackles it admirably. (Andy Jamieson, West End Branch, Edinburgh, Scotland)
Mensa Books
It is a tremendous and absorbing plot in its own right... a series of mathematical codes and clues are hidden throughout the book, all giving clues about what is really happening. There are a number of historical theories surrounding the Pied Piper story. One involves the Children's Crusade of the early 13th century when 'mystic prophets' were said to have taken 30,000 children from their homes and away to Jerusalem; another connected to the recolonization of Eastern Europe. It is certainly confirmation if any were needed, that Helen's decision to perform a genre switch (from romance) was a smart move. (The Editor)
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