Toni Morrison is an author who can make you cry with only two
words – “iron bit”, “chokecherry tree”, “yellow flowers” and yet those two words
can also haunt you like a powerful night terror, leaving you sick at the history
they point to.
Set in the mid-1800s, in the last years of slavery, Beloved is a ghost story.
124 Bluestone Road, Ohio is troubled. Not in a spooky, spine tingling way but in the
way a trauma shatters a home leaving its occupants broken.
In the first hundred
words I found secreted amongst tangled phrases like “baby venom” and “lively
spite” a wrathful poltergeist which the rest of the book tries to exorcise. In
the final chapter there is no reequilibrium, no burst of clean sunlight or
short plump woman crying “This house is clean!” Instead the feeling left in the
house, and beyond, is that past demons have been dug up, unleashed into the world
to rattle their chains into the present day.
Beloved is one of
the most important books I think I will ever read. And I was disappointed to realise that after scouring the internet book lists for a suitable Southern Gothic,
I never found it on a list. Toni Morrison’s use of the supernatural to stir up
her character’s repressed memories, and the soul-breaking realities they echo is
proof of the potency of the horror genre and the power of books themselves.
