About book All Heads Turn When The Hunt Goes By (1986)
All Heads Turn When The Hunt Goes By has not only a great title, but also a story that grabs you and pulls you along. A member of the black magic genre, it is a continuation of Rider Haggard’s 1887 novel She, in which Ayesha, an ancient white goddess in Africa with supernatural powers, dies but, like General Macarthur, promises to return. Now shheeee’s baaaacccckkk! And she's pissed!!This 1978 novel starts in June of 1942 when Captain Charles (“Champ”) Bradwin attends the wedding of his brother, “Clipper,” at the Blue Ridge Military Academy in Virginia, from which the males in this old southern family have always graduated. The Bradwin family is headed by Boss, a powerful patriarch akin to the one in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The wedding in the old and beautiful but poorly maintained chapel is a happy event indeed—well, not quite. Something eerie arrives and things go very badly awry-—very badly. Still, there is some good news: Champ gets it on with his stepmother, who is a year younger than him (was it an hallucination?).We flip back a few weeks to Hawkspurn House, an old-age home in Yorkshire England. An old man, Dr. Eustace Holley, has died and been strangely mutilated: he was blown into a tree by what witnesses describe as an explosion—-but nobody else is hurt, and there is no other damage to suggest an explosion. Eustace has been estranged from his son, Jackson, since both had an unhappy experience in East Africa, where Eustace had been a missionary doctor bringing up his son. In 1920 Eustace met an ancient white woman, a “white goddess,” who had been born in 1736; that makes her 184 years old—-perhaps it was Joan Rivers?. Was it an hallucination? Anyhow, the symbol of the white goddess was a serpent, and, Hiiissss is her sound. Jackson emerges from Africa terrified of snakes, and for good reason. Lord Luxton, who arrives at Hawkspurn in his chauffeured Rolls Royce, investigates Eustace’s death. Luxton is an idiosyncratic aristocrat who heads a bomb squad; he will soon die in that car. Just after his death, we jump forward two years to Kansas City in 1944. Champ is now a disabled and mustered-out war hero passing through KC. While in combat on a Pacific island he was wounded and, as he lay in his blood, his dead brother (Clipper) attacked him with a sword, saying, “It is time. We all must die!” Was it an hallucination? All we know is that Champ is found with a strange facial wound made by a sword. Hiiissss!In KC Champ is attacked by several relatives of an under-age girl whom he has impregnated--once a straight arrow, his morals have slipped a bit. Who should come to his rescue but Jackson Holley, now a down-and-out doctor treating low-lifes in the City of Steaks. Jackson nurses Champ back to some semblance of health and, having nothing better to do, takes Champ via train to his ancestral home in Chisca Falls, Arkansas where Nhorah, Champ’s young stepmother, is now the family matriarch and the mistress of the Bradwin plantation. Strange things happen on the train, and yes, Hiiissss!Jackson, Champ, and Nhora--who had, like Jackson, been raised in East Africa--are united at Champ’s home estate, thus bringing together the main survivors of the strange events in Africa in the 1920s and in Virgina in the 1940s. It is,/i> a small world. Should we expect the tension to mount? You betcha! But I can’t tell you the details or Clipper will kill me. Once you open the book, you are sure to continue until all truth is revealed. Or not! Hiiissss!This is a very unusual novel, filled with suspense and dread, catering to those who can suspend their disbelief in the superstitious, the supernatural, and the power of black magic. It is not for the ultra-rationalists, or for those with weak stomachs. It is reasonably well written, though with some editing problems. But the writing is not what keeps you going. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I’ll probably look for another John Farris book soon.Four stars.
Not my usual cup of tea, but the title was too baroque to pass up. The book is a good example of an American author floundering out of his depth. The first part, set in the US, is competent and establishes the right kind of southern gothic atmosphere. Then for some perverse reason (the plot does not demand it) the second part takes the action over to Britain and strips the author of all credibility. Characters start talking as if they were Hollywood Englishmen played by Ronald Colman or Dame May Whitty (the former explicitly mentioned). The author believes, bizarrely, that an English earl can be styled 'sir' and be an M.P., and that a military officer must salute a civilian if the latter is a lord. The point of view is all over the place (sometimes shifting twice on the same page), as are 'his lordships' and 'mylords'. You start referring to a character as 'his lordship' and you know you are lost. For part of the time, the narrative is taken up in the authorial voice by an English spinster who took no part in the events she (floridly) describes. Sloppiness like this destroys not only the atmosphere, but also the narrative authority without which fiction is just a random tale, randomly told. Although the book then returns to the US, it never recovers. The plot degenerates into mumbo jumbo, and mumbo jumbo is neither scary nor really conducive to metaphysical insight - and what's the use of horror that does not transcend the physical plane? Robert Aickman was contemptuously dismissive of horror as a genre; this is not the book to prove him wrong.
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Having such an esoteric reading quirk as out-of-print horror novels from the ‘70s/’80s is a hit-or-miss proposition. Most aren’t that bad, but are still quite lowbrow, their joys serving as a type of literary comfort food. Then some are just God-awful, coming off as if they were written by a high-schooler during study hall.But there is another end of the spectrum: those real finds that surprise you with their quality. Ones that aren’t merely good “horror” novels but simply good novels, period. John Farris’s “All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By” is such a book. Described by some as a kind-of Freudian horror novel, it sports surprisingly accomplished prose and narrative techniques, unraveling the tale of a southern family dynasty in the early ‘40s. WWII somewhat figures into the story, but not as much as Africa (yes, it’s an odd mix of themes). Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you’ll zip through “All Heads Turn…” It requires a bigger investment of time than do other novels from the genre. If you make that investment, though, your imagination will be handsomely rewarded.
—Jeff Francis
This came highly recommended from a horror group I'm in. I must be a bit jaded, because I didn't actually find this book shocking in the least. And maybe I'm just spoiled by reading so much rich language by classic horror writers that modern horror writers fail to impress me.Whatever reason, I had a hard time forcing myself through this book. It just didn't grip and pull me in at any point. The story itself isn't bad, but I felt that the first half of the book (aside from the very beginning) was kind of dull.Another thing that bothered me was the lack of explanation for so many things that happen. I'm not going to spoil anything for anyone who really wants to read it, but at the end I was just left feeling "That was it?" I'm guessing the lack of explanation is just supposed to be chalked up to the power of voodoo. Or maybe the author just got lazy.Overall, not bad but not necessarily recommended either. I was at a used book store yesterday and I saw all the author's other books there, but I passed them up.
—Martha
Sizzling voodoo horror from the Seventies - one of those pre-King novels that have become largely forgotten. One fascinating thing about this book is that it shows what horror was before it became formulaic during the Eighties. The structure and character development are interesting and somewhat odd, the atmosphere of the book is unique. "All Head Turn..." has one obvious structural problem - the second half cannot sustain the heady pace of the first one. But the quality of the writing sustains the story. Horror elements are carefully developed, mostly oblique and effectively woven into the narrative. The slow pacing is a tonic for readers exhausted by the mechanical Spielberg pacing of modern horror.
—Tero Kuittinen
