Sineater (Elizabeth Massie)
From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Sineater |
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| Author: | Elizabeth Massie |
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| Publisher: | Leisure Books |
According to legend, the sineater is a dark and mysterious figure of the night, condemned to live alone in the woods, who devours food from the chests of the dead to allow them to ascend to heaven. In the small Virginia town, children have to lock themselves away when there is a death in their family and the sineater calls to their home. To look upon the sineater is to see the face of all the evil he has eaten, and to become insane with the overwhelming presence of sin. But now the order has been broken, the tradition violated; the sineater has a family of his own, although even his wife and children must avert their gaze on the rare occasions he visits them. And with this broken taboo comes a rash of disturbing events. When Joel, the sineater’s youngest child, begins to try to lead a normal life, strange occurrences start to affect the peaceful existence of the community, and harm comes in different forms to anyone who has dealings with him. Before long no one is safe from the dark forces that have been set loose, and Joel must discover if the havoc that is being wreaked on the town emanates from the sineater, the community itself, or some other mysterious force.
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Reviews
Amazon.com
This grim, claustral story is about the consequences of a primitive form of Christianity practiced in the mountains of Virginia, the author’s home state. The sineater is a man shunned by all, a man whose face should never be seen. He performs the valuable service of absorbing all the sins of each person who dies, by eating ritual food laid out on their corpses. When the sineater’s son, Joel, is allowed to attend school, a series of violent omens convinces the fanatic locals that God is punishing them and that Judgment Day is nigh. As Joel searches for the real perpetrator of the crimes, along with other adolescents who reluctantly listen to him, the plot (the weakest part of the book) begins to resemble a wandering sort of whodunit. The focus of the novel, though, is on the well-evoked mood of fear and despair. Elizabeth Massie works her horror effects with an intimate approach, closing in on her characters as if she’s trapping them. And her descriptions do justice to the rustic setting, where people live in four-room cabins and honeysuckle winds around the knotty rails of the fences.
Sineater won a Bram Stoker Award for First Novel in 1993. Massie also won a Stoker for her novella “Stephen,” published in the first Borderlands anthology. As Tom Monteleone writes in Borderlands 3, Massie wields “a subtle power that rips at your emotions with velvet claws.” —Fiona Webster
