The Edge of Running Water (1939) by William Sloane

Even the cover is quiet. Too quiet...

The Edge of Running Water (1939) by William Sloane: William Sloane remains somewhat known today for this pseudo-science-fictional horror novel and To Walk the Night, another pseudo-science-fictional horror novel from the 1930's. They're both horror but very quiet horror -- Charles L. Grant would have been proud.

Filmmakers adapted The Edge of Running Water in 1941 as The Devil Commands, a solid and relatively faithful Boris Karloff movie with a completely anomalous title. 

The Edge of Running Water concerns the efforts of a scientist to build a machine that can contact the dead. He's motivated by the death of his wife from pneumonia. He has a strange woman as his helper. And he's called upon an old friend and former student he hasn't seen for years to provide some vital information needed to complete the experiment. Near a small town in the wilds of pre-Stephen-King Maine, the scientist's experiments have already attracted attention and rumour-mongering among that small town's residents.

And periodically, a strange thunder-like sound booms out from the scientist's house, a sound he will not explain to anyone.

The novel is long on mood and gradually-building suspense and somewhat short on actual scares. Sloane's first-person narrator -- that old friend -- can seem a bit glib at times, and perhaps even a little dense. However, that denseness works in the novel's favour when it comes to the cosmic horror that underlies the novel. 

Our narrator -- and, indeed, everyone else in the novel -- seems to be blithely unaware of the possibility that the experiment creates something much more disturbing than a telephone line to the dead. A terrible mystery may have been solved by the climax of the novel. But is a mystery solved when no one knows it, or at least admits to its solution?

Yes. Yes it is.

The Edge of Running Water is a quiet book, dominated at one point by an overly lengthy police investigation and throughout by the love story that develops between the narrator and the dead wife's sister, who has also come to find out what her uncle is up to.  Recommended.