Darkness on the Edge of Town

Jackal. Erin E. Adams. 2022.

After reading a handful of middling to bad genre novels, I’ve recently hit a streak of good ones. Jackal is very good. I’m not sure it’s a great novel; it feels more like a first novel by someone capable of greatness. It is solid though, and that counts for a lot. There’s so much bad horror out there. It’s nice to appreciate a horror novel that just really gets the job done.

That does mean I’m not sure I have much to say about it. It was scary, the politics was handled well, the characterization and pacing were good. The stakes were high and everything had a cost. I liked the main character. Her lack of reliability as a narrator made sense; the strategic concealments and repression in her own mind arose organically out of her personality and her history; nothing was manipulative.

This all sounds kind of back-handed, which is not how I mean it. I guess I can just see how badly this novel could have been, because I’ve seen so many books that are kind of like it, that the fact that Adams pulled it off seems almost miraculous. For instance: the plot concerns the regular disappearance of young Black girls in a small Pennsylvania Rustbelt town. The majority white population might all be in on it. They also might not - much of the tension comes from the main character’s inability to know which people she can trust, because she’s so used to trusting none of them. The kind of paranoia that racism can instill in its victims is conveyed really naturally and powerfully; you really do think that everyone is potentially in on the conspiracy, right along with the main character, so when you find out that they’re not it’s almost disappointing.

I almost found the ending anticlimactic for that reason - it didn’t make sense that the killings and kidnappings were carried out by just a few people acting alone, when I had been expecting a town-wide conspiracy. It was on reflection that I realized the appropriateness of Adams’ choice here, because that’s the point - it doesn’t need to be a literal conspiracy to be effectively the same as one. The cops didn’t investigate who was regularly kidnapping and killing little Black girls not because they were all in on it too, but for the tragically mundane fact that they didn’t care. It’s the inertia of systems that keeps white supremacy going as much as anything else. There doesn’t need to be a cabal in a room together planning and cackling. Just a set of people, acting in their own interest, and acting in solidarity when it makes sense to them.

A worse writer, I think, would have fulfilled that expectation and made it a conspiracy. A worse writer would have been much more heavy handed. It’s instead just allowed to be a sad fact of life in America that the main character’s best friend, a white woman married to a Black man with a Black daughter of her own, could still be kind of a racist. Adams apparently grew up in Johnstown, PA, and her deftness at conveying the weird shifting tensions between different sets of white and Black people, how those tensions are mediated and determined by class as well as race, is impressive.

I hope Adams writes more novels - I know she’s got another coming out this June. I’ll definitely read it.