Do You Dare to Face The Manitou?

THE MANITOU: A HORROR CLASSIC
by Graham Masterton
“If you think it’s an easy life being a mystic, you ought to try telling fifteen fortunes a day, at $25 a time, and then see whether you’re quite so keen on it.”

GENRE:

Horror Fiction, Fantasy

DESCRIPTORS:

Shamans, Magic, Manitous, Hospitals, Doctors, Police, Computers, Mystics, Frauds, Medicine Man, Revenge,

SUMMARY:

On the eve of surgery to remove a tumor on the back of her neck, Karen consults mystic Harry Erskine to reassure herself that she’ll survive the surgery. She tells him of her dream, of an indian’s tremendous fear upon sighting the Dutch ships off the coast of America. Then things go wrong.

Mrs. Herz kills heself after giving Harry a cryptic message “De boot, mijnheer, de boot.” The surgery fails and the tumor is revealed as a fetus, draining Karen’s life for its own, but not before it has been x-rayed enough to deform the unborn baby. Harry calls in his spiritualist friend Amelia for a seance and the medicine man uses it to see who the enemy is. Later a fire kills Amelia and her boyfriend.

Harry then enlists the aid of a modern medicine man called Singing Rock. But the indian magics are a pale shadow to Misquamacus’ and the manitous Misquamacus summons enables him to lock down the hospital as he begins to summon the most fearsome manitou of all — ‘The Great Old One’. When Singing Rock’s magics prove to be too feeble, he realizes that only one man has a chance of standing against ‘The Great Old One’ — the white-man and mystic-fraud, Harry Erskine.

APPEAL:

Simple, straight forward and still effectively creepy, the Manitou is deservidly a horror classic. The writing is crisp and clean, descriptions kept to an evocative minimum and the pacing is brisk.

Here is Masterton’s strength. In Harry Erskine (who is modelled after the author himself) we have a delightful psychic sham artist who quickly finds himself in over head but unable to just walk away and abandon Karen to her fate. There is Singing Rock, perhaps the formost medicine man of this age whose abilities are a pale shadow compared to Misquamacus. Masterton populates his world with quite a few characters who are easly to love and puts them in dire straits.

The story starts with Karen’s doctors consulting on the case of a strange tumor growing on her neck. The chapter is told in 3rd person, past tense, limited omnisicence. Harry enters in the second chapter and is revealed as the story’s narrator and the remainer of the novel is told in 1st person past tense limited to Harry’s point of view.

The story takes place in New York but harkens back to a mythic “heroic age” of Indian history when Medicine Men were powerful weilders of magic and yet on the verge of being decimiated by the plagues that the Dutch were carrying with them. Masterton conjures up both settings with great skill. The only time the novel stumbles is with the irritating use of racial epitathets such as the red indian.

READALIKES:

If you liked Masterton, you might enjoy the classic horror fiction of J. N. Williamson such as The Tulpa and Affinity or Charles Grant’s The Pet.