Years after the (completely natural and less than mysterious) death of her husband, Athena, a coloured, terribly unhappy woman from the city, still lives with her mentally handicapped and/or just plain strange son Matty in the ramshackle family home in the Jersey Pine Barrens she and her husband had planned on renovating. Athena has trouble relating to her son and spends most of her time away from him as a voluntary rescue helper for the barely operational local emergency service of her only friend Doris and with a rather sordid affair with corrupt cop Barry. If we can believe the book, the communities in the Barrens are something from Lovecraft's nightmares (well, those that weren't xenophobic): incestuous and degenerated to an unbelievable degree with a higher percentage of mental illnesses than you'll find in the average psychiatric clinic.
Also, people tend to disappear there more often than seems credible without sinister goings on deeper than the things Barry and the Sheriff Frank are up to.
Now, the disappearances turn into outright murders. People are mangled and ravaged by something the authorities (if you want to call them that) think is a roaming pack of dogs; something that seems to be closing in on Athena in a way no normal pack of animals would do. Even worse is that Matty seems to have some form of mental rapport with the monster that might just be the source for the legend of the Jersey Devil...
I had read quite a few good things about The Pines and was glad when Leisure Books announced their new mass market edition. Say what you will about Leisure (like, for example, that most of their original novels could really use another rewrite or just stronger editing), but they are doing their bit to keep some of the more marketable horror fiction of the past thirty years in print.
The novel itself is an interesting piece of work, flawed in many aspects, but successful enough in one single element that I can still recommend it heartily.
Most troubling for me are moments of nearly cringeworthy dialogue, especially the permanent (and just incredibly annoying) use of "dialect" - one of the major sins of dialogue writing committed by authors everywhere. If you are not a linguist, or really really good at what you do when trying to sound like "the local people" (who are for some reason always much less educated than yourself and so obviously must be stupid and have to sound that way, too), just don't.
The local people lead quite neatly to the book's next problem: characterization. Some of the core characters, like Athena or Barry's partner Steven, are well drawn, nuanced and believable, but as soon as we come to the "Pineys", Dunbar pulls out all stops to push us into the most cliched "degenerate villager" stereotypes imaginable. Combined with the language they use, these caricatures are sometimes hard to take and I have quite a bit of trouble not to think of the author having some rather problematic ideas about the mental capacities of uneducated people.
While it's hard not to sympathize with Dunbar's themes of redemption and emotionally closed up people opening up to life again, the plot he utilizes to explore them has its own problems. The core of the plot is strong, there is just a lack of control - many sub-plots just fade out without having gone anywhere, important ideas aren't explored enough, most of the murders would better be handled off-stage and the ending - as well as the way Athena has to act to set it up - isn't properly constructed at all. The explanation for Dunbar's version of the Jersey Devil is not original, yet fine enough, but it does in no emotionally or logically successful way lead to the ending the book has.
Now, having been less than enthusiastic about dialogue, plot and characters, why is it I still don't think the time reading The Pines is wasted? It's Dunbar's language when he's not writing dialogue or action. One seldom finds a book this evocative of a mood of dread, despair and the humid oppression of rot. The author paints a disturbing picture here of nature far from being a thing of beauty or romantically wild, but a thing of terror more deserving of fear than the thing that hides beneath the bed or in the cupboard. This element of the book is Lovecraftian in all the best meanings of the word and strong enough to keep the novel afloat through some very rocky moments.
Your mileage may vary, of course.
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