Steve-Calvert.co.uk
Steve-Calvert.co.uk
A Passion For Horror
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Bentley Little's novel The Mailman (not to be confused with Little's short story The Mailman) is set in the small town of Willis Arizona where trouble arrives in the form of a new mailman. The town's previous mailman, a guy named Bob Ronda, had been doing the job for years and he was about as reliable as you could get. The people of Willis never had a bad word to say about him. Then, for no reason at all, Bob decided to suck on his shotgun and blew himself away in an act of suicide that was a messy as it was unexpected.
The new mailman arrives on the day of Bob's funeral. He is called John Smith and is the only one at the funeral who is not wearing black. Instead he is wearing his blue postal worker's uniform and due to his pale complexion and shock of red hair the blue uniform with the brass buttons up the front seems rather clownish. There is nothing funny, however, about John Smith and as soon as local school teacher, Doug Albin sees the new guy he gets a bad feeling about him.
Doug is the main viewpoint character in the story; other viewpoint characters include his wife Tritia and their young son Billy. Doug though is the first person to suspect that there is something sinister about the new mailman and right from the start Doug believes that Smith is tampering with the town's mail.
At first it is the bills that worry Doug: where are they? Not only have the Bills stopped coming in, but so has all the other bad mail, instead there has been a sudden influx of good mail. Friends who have moved away from the area begin writing to the Albins again (or do they?) and Doug receives a letter informing him that the warranty on their Bronco's power train has been extended for a year -- for free! Tritia receives a subscription to the Fruit-of-the Month Club courtesy of an anonymous donor, while Billy, not to be left out, gets letters from both his grandmothers and each letter has money inside. None of this sits well with Doug. It is not normal for the only news to be good news and he knows that the bills are due.
Then one night the power goes out and the Albins cannot ring the suppliers because the phone is not working either. The next morning the water stops too and Doug is forced to go down to the department of water and power to find out what the hell is happening. You are probably thinking that the problem is because Doug has not paid his bills. That is not the problem though -- not yet anyway, that comes later. The problem is a little more shocking and Doug is a surprised man indeed when the girl behind the counter shows him the letters, supposedly written by him, informing them that he is moving to California, and asking for his supply to be cut off. Doug is not a happy chappy and he is less happy still when the girl mentions a reconnection charge. Fortunately Doug manages to get that charge waived, but the phone company, who have received a similar letter, are less accommodating and will not resume services until he coughs up twenty-five dollars.
The Albins manage to get their utilities back on line, but keeping everything up and running is another matter entirely and they are not the only ones having trouble. The whole town is having problems of one sort or another and Doug knows who is responsible -- the mailman. Throughout the town Bills seem to be a thing of the past, all of the good mail has turned bad, and people are receiving letters from friends that are about them, but not to them, as if the sender had placed the letter in the wrong envelope by mistake. Needless to say the contents are not exactly flattering to the recipient and a lot of bad blood is causing pressure in the town. Doug's friend Hobie even starts getting letters from his younger brother, who died in Vietnam in the sixties, and those letters contain things that threaten to drive the poor man out of his mind. In a case like this it would seem that no news would be very good news indeed, but the letters keep on coming and, worse still, Doug begins to suspect that the mailman might not even be human.
This theme of an outside influence entering a community and trying to destroy it is one that I have seen before, Little uses it quite often and nobody does it better. In his book The Store, for instance, the visiting evil is a supermarket chain. Here it is a mailman and it is a very clever story. One of the interesting things about this story is the way that the evil newcomer, though responsible for all the problems in Willis, works his evil magic by acting as the catalyst that brings out the worst in people and causes them to do some pretty horrific things to each other. Bentley Little is a great writer and if you have never read any of his work this one might be a good place to start. The Mailman is 440 pages long and guarantees a special delivery of fear that is first class all the way through.
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