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Rain of terror >> A Dry Spell is a ghost story for a rainy day by JULIET WATERS
Moloney's second book is a gothic novel about a small farming community in North Dakota plagued by a four-year drought brought on by supernatural causes. A Winnipeg native who now lives on Manitoulin Island, she has been favourably compared by more than a few American reviewers to Stephen King. Although the launch of the hardcover edition of A Dry Spell last fall was seriously overshadowed by the death of Princess Diana, Moloney did get a slight media buzz for receiving a seven-figure advance and selling the film option to Tom Cruise. It's easy to imagine the hyper level of publicity Cruise would get if he ever decided to make a film out of A Dry Spell. Just picture an extra-chipper Mary Hart punning "from Rain Man to Rainmaker..." It's also easy to put Cruise's face on the central hero, Tom Keatley, the rainmaker who has come to save the inappropriately named town of Goodlands. And Cruise would probably do a competent job in the role of a handsome drifter with great pecs and a past (although Keatley is a bit taciturn for the average fast-talking Cruise role). But it's harder to visualize A Dry Spell as a blockbuster Hollywood film. This is partly because a drought isn't exactly the kind of natural disaster that spawns high-budget special effects. Although, with the right F/X team and a director with a good sense of camp who was willing to exploit the supernatural element (the tortured spirit of a young girl killed a century ago has returned to deprive the town of rain, and possess a few souls along the way), this book could be turned into a cross between Bridges of Madison County and Evil Dead 2. The plot line revolves around heroine Karen Grange, a renegade loan officer whose conscience is tortured by all the farms she's had to foreclose now that the freak drought (which has not hit any of the neighbouring towns) is in its fourth year. For some reason, Karen feels responsible for the misery of this town and, as it turns out, she is. Karen is a shopaholic who's been exiled to Goodlands by her bank as punishment for landing herself deeply in debt. A closet romantic, her last act of self-indulgence before she renounces her compulsion to spend is to commission a gazebo to be built in her backyard. But while the workers are digging up the land they inadvertently dig up the remains of a tortured soul. This sparks the drought, as well as a series of minor disasters, as the young ghost enters various bodies and wreaks malevolent mischief on the town. Eventually, in a moment of desperate folly, Karen writes to a rainmaker she saw on a Tales of the Unexplained type TV show. Enter Keatley to save the town, and Karen, from their respective dry spells. (Karen hasn't had a boyfriend in a long time, ergo the subtitle on the front cover: "Four years without rain. A lifetime without love. Until the rainmaker came to town..." and the hyperbolic corollary on the back cover: "A woman haunted by fear. A town gripped by terror. A man with the power to set them both free.") The whole novel threatens to become unforgivably cheesy around the point where the advent of rain brings on a wet T-shirt moment of passion between Karen and Keatley. But for the most part, A Dry Spell is saved by some decent writing, the strong talent for small-town gothic detail that has earned Moloney her comparisons to King and the occasional evidence of a very dry sense of humour, so subtle it can be easy to miss. Where Moloney fails is in not creating enough human evil to mix with the supernatural evil, something never lacking in a King masterpiece. Also, Moloney doesn't effectively exploit the dramatic consequences of drought. For instance, a town that hasn't had rain in four years is a fire hazard waiting to erupt. While there are a few fires in Goodlands, they're all easily handled by the volunteer fire department, which is hardly realistic. And finally, the kind of rain that might come after four years of drought is another potential natural disaster that Moloney doesn't milk enough. Nevertheless, you could find a worse book to read on a rainy day. A Dry Spell by Susie Moloney, Seal Books, pb, 436 pp, $8.99
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I expected that reading Susie Moloney's A Dry Spell during last week's heat wave was going to be something like reading Jaws at the beach.