The masters of the horror novel have such far-reaching influence that it becomes difficult at times to accept new writers into the fold, as readers are all too quick to point out recycled plot points and character archetypes. While this is a danger in truly any genre, it becomes an even greater problem in horror, where the influence of the greats and their prolific works spread far to all forms of media. So when established anthology writer Gord Rollo introduced his first full-length novel, Crimson, first published in 2002 and then re-released on a wider scale in 2009, the comparisons to previous works by other authors was immediately apparent.

Crimson spins the dark coming-of-age drama of four young boys in a quiet, rural town with a dark past, who mistakenly release a great evil, spending the rest of their short lives confronting the repercussions of what they had done. The obvious influence from horror master Stephen King cannot go unnoticed, or even unmentioned; comparisons to the short tale The Body and the acclaimed novel IT are immediate and unavoidable. However, where King’s masterful storytelling fully confronts the horrors of childhood friends entrenched in the drama of an inescapable evil, Crimson author Rollo merely stumbles and creates a cartoonish take on the same story. Worse still are the notations on the very book jacket, comparing Rollo’s work to King’s; any hope of disassociating one from the other is lost when the publisher chooses a blurb that decries Rollo’s debut novel as the superior to King’s classic. As the novel follows with blatant references to both IT and the short tale The Body that are far too similar for a mere homage, it becomes difficult to accept Rollo’s novel at face value, as the reader instead finds passage upon passage to compare to King’s works.

Rollo’s story centers on young Johnny Page, a classic new-kid-in-town who moves into the local spook house, an abandoned farm that had been the site of several grisly murders some years before. The boy’s family itself is something of a cliche: the absent father, the overweight and overbearing mother, the meager upbringing. This is Eddie Kasprak and Ben Hanscom reborn, shifted from late 1950's Maine to late 1970's Ontario and given a new name. Mother Page herself is a walking stereotype, the barest shell of an actual character as Rollo resorts to describing the woman by focusing on her weight, having her think about bettering her lifestyle but decide to eat donuts instead and, worst of all, fall into a pitiful slapstick routine where her girth causes her to fall and break a coffee table. There is no substance here, making it difficult to take the novel seriously when what should be, at the least, a fairly important supporting character is nothing more than gross caricature.

As the story progresses, the willingness to suspend disbelief that is so important to the horror genre may begin to wane as serious questions about the story begin to arise. First and foremost, could a woman and her young son truly move into a small town’s infamous murder house and somehow not hear of the evil that had happened there in ages past? The level of depravity that the author rolls out in the novel’s prologue is deep and disturbing, encompassing axe-murder, suicide, missing bodies, cannibalism and, perhaps worst of all, the horrific death of a helpless toddler. Such vicious acts would be burned into a small town’s psyche; is it really plausible that no one would have told the Page family? The addition of the three local boys, David, Peter, and Tom, make it all the more unbelievable. Young men of that age are notorious for their obnoxious behavior, and it is terribly difficult to believe that not one of the three would have taken ghoulish joy in spilling the beans about the Page home’s history to the new kid on the block.

Bound together with the horror of their frightening discovery, the boys become haunted by manifestations of their own deep-seated fears and as the years pass, the terror they had endured once again comes to be visited upon the little town itself. Rollo’s villain, a demonic pastiche of a dozen or so horror archetypes, attempts the sort of sarcastic bold-faced witticisms that are the calling card of Freddy Krueger, antihero of the Nightmare on Elm Street films, as he wreaks his particular brand of havoc on the four boys. Again, Rollo falls to poor imitation rather than any real innovation.

The great shame in all of this is that Rollo more than proves his worth and talent as a horror writer in the fast-paced, horrifying prologue that could have – and really should have – established Crimson as a stellar debut novel, had the great originality shown in those far too brief pages extended further into the novel. Gord Rollo is most definitely an author to watch, if only to hope that he is able to find his own voice and deliver the stunning horror novel that the world is waiting for.