The Pet (1986) by Charles L. Grant

The Pet (1986) by Charles L. Grant: The late Charles L. Grant was a much-published anthologist, novelist, and short-story writer from the 1970's through the 1990's. He championed "quiet horror," a choice that set him vocally at odds with the rise of splatterpunk in the 1980's. He's probably most important now as an anthologist, especially as the editor of the long-running Shadows series of original horror anthologies.

The horror boom of the 1970's and 1980's also meant that Grant published a lot of novels. More than I was aware of, frankly. While I was a major consumer of those anthologies back in the day and read a couple of his short-story collections, I hadn't read a Grant novel until I recently finished The Pet.

I'm of two minds about The Pet, though these minds are not mutually exclusive. Wait, does that make three minds? So confusing.

Anyway, The Pet may be a satire of slasher movies and Stephen King novels of the 1970's and 1980's.

Or The Pet may be an attempt to replicate the success of slasher movies and Stephen King novels of the 1970's and 1980's by putting their elements into a blender and pressing the 'On' button.

Or it may be both. It's certainly not of a piece with those Grant short stories and novellas I've read.

OK, that's really three, isn't it?

So we have a bullied, withdrawn protagonist of high-school age. That's Donald 'Duck' Boyd. His parents are both over-controlling and under-caring. He has a dead younger brother. His Mom is sleeping with a high-school teacher who hates Don and keeps marking him unfairly. His Dad is the principal of the school Don attends. This gets Don bullied even more, especially because Don's father doesn't believe him when bullies start framing him for various misdemeanors. His parents both preferred the dead brother. Three years after the death, his Mom still occasionally calls Don by the dead brother's name.

Whew! That's about 35 King stories and novels right there!

A mean chemistry teacher also singles Don out for unwanted persecution. We can tell this chemistry teacher is bad because he's a confirmed bachelor who watches porn movies in his basement. 

IN HIS BASEMENT! PORN! 

Sorry.

A super-hot, 17-year-old cheerleader seems to be making advances on Don. Ha ha, she's also making advances on his Dad! Yes, a teen-aged girl who is sexually aggressive and makes advances on her teachers. Is this Grant's salute to the Police song "Don't Stand So Close To Me"? Or is it just a really unpleasant part of the novel that has not aged well?

So so unpleasant.

Then a serial killer dubbed The Howler shows up in Don's small town of Ashford, New Jersey. The Howler has killed and partially eaten several teenagers in New Jersey and New York. 

You might think this would cause the formation of some sort of police task force or even an FBI presence. 

You would be wrong! 

Dealing with The Howler in Don's town devolves down to that town's small police force of what seems like three idiots, which does a whole lot of nothing. Boy, is this part of the novel ridiculously unbelievable! And it gets worse!

The town's two high schools are remarkably modest in their response to two students being murdered and eaten in a one-month period. And the police. Really, everyone. Don survives an attack from The Howler and his parents have him back in school within 36 hours. Seriously, Grant is just phoning in this shit.

So, as the back-cover blurb tells us, Don's encounter with The Howler unleashes a supernatural monster that makes The Howler look like a fart in an elevator. And that monster has a connection to Don, targeting those who've wronged Don in some way. It's sort of Carrie by way of Christine, except it's a giant super-horse sprung full-grown from one of the animal posters on Don's bedroom wall.

Oh, yeah. Don loves animals and wants to be a vet. His parents think being a vet is a road to financial ruin, which shows how stupid they are. This is definitely the only novel I've ever read in which parents resist the idea of their son becoming a veterinarian for financial reasons. I mean seriously, parents, you're school teachers. In the United States of America. Your salaries are not that big!

If Grant is trying to emulate King in the next 200 pages or so, he's hamstrung by his "quiet horror" approach insofar as the novel pulls away from the attacks of the monster at the moment of attack, returning to show the aftermath without too much explicit description. Grant also can't bring himself to give the novel a big climax (remember Carrie's death march through school and town?) or even a physical confrontation between Don and the super-horse (remember the garage battle in Christine?). 

At one point, Don hears the screams in the town football stadium and believes the monster has attacked the football game. If you think, as I did, "Bring it on!" at this point, forget it. The monster is not there.

Part of the problem with the novel is that Don is an odd but sympathetic figure, with so many problems heaped upon his head by Grant, with Don's tormentors (including his parents) consistently shown to be selfish, brutish, thoughtless assholes. 

Another problem lies in peculiar absences. The dead brother is the worst of these: our sum total of knowledge about why Don's parents prefer the dead son to the live one is that the dead one was obedient. OK! A flashback showing rather than telling about the brother never materializes. Even the trauma that would come with a dead son and brother is muted, barely considered by parents or Don. 

Once the horse starts killing people -- well, who cares, really? Grant's small town is such an abysmal place that it deserves to get leveled. Other than Don and Don's two best friends, Tracey and Jeff, there are no sympathetic characters. Well, OK, there's an old guy and his daschund. But even Jeff is a cipher, there only to form a potential romantic triangle with Tracey and Don, who also has a crush on Tracey. 

Tracey is drawn somewhat sympathetically until the last ten pages or so, when she does something that is completely unbelievable given what she's learned about Don and the supernatural in the previous hundred pages. Unless she's suicidal.

At the end (which isn't even really an end but more of a pause), I"m left again wondering if this was a failed attempt by Grant to write a Stephen King novel, or a failed attempt at parody. Or both. Its flaws, large and legion in number, are fascinating enough to make it worth reading. And frustratingly good moments of tension and character-building keep floating to the surface before being submerged again in the slurry. Just don't expect to feel satisfied at the end. Lightly recommended.