Jacaranda, the most recent entry in Cherie Priest’s Clockwork Century alternate history, reads like a movie. This isn’t a bad thing, per se. What it does mean, though, is that the beats of the story come in precise and familiar places, and that fans of the people-getting-picked-off-in-a-spooky-location cinematic subgenre are probably going to spot both the ending and the denouement coming.
But the pleasure here is in the execution as much as it is in the familiarity of the form. A nun, a priest and a Texas Ranger all gather at a haunted hotel in Galveston just ahead of a monstrous hurricane. Built over the spot where a sacred jacaranda was cut down, the hotel – named after its predecessor — has a reputation for being cursed and a body count of guests and staff two dozen deep. With the storm approaching, only the desperate or disbelieving will stay there, along with the staff and the three mismatched investigators.
Of course, everyone’s got secrets, and as the hotel starts picking off guests one by one those secrets come to light. Priest is well aware of the formula she’s working with, and most of the uninteresting guests are dispatched quickly and without fuss in order to provide the main characters with the ritually necessary clues. All the guests who get cut down have something dirty in their personal histories and deserve what they get, but what they get to do is mostly set us up for the dirty secrets of the heroic trio.
Of the three, it’s the priest who gets the bulk of the attention, and it’s his sin that’s simultaneously the most complicated and interesting. A former gunslinger turned man of God, he broke a vow never to pick up his guns in anger again, and even though he broke the vow for the best of reasons, the need to find expiation of his guilt is what ultimately drives him to the Jacaranda. The fact that a small miracle may have occurred as he broke the vow is the sort of sly detail that elevates Fr. Rios’s character above cliche; the sense that the guilt may be an unnecessary burden he’s levied on himself, and that this unnecessary sin is what allows him to join the other damned ones at the hotel. It is only the assumed sin, and not a real one, that lets him be where he needs to be. Then again, assuming one’s judgment is more correct than Divine will is a sin of pride, so perhaps Rios deserves his fate after all.
As for Sister Eileen Callahan and aging Ranger Horatio Korman, their stories are briefer, their sins less complicated. But like Rios and unlike the other denizens of the hotel (staff included), they’re looking for the chance to atone. Where the others await evil or flee blindly into its arms, it’s the three outsiders who see beyond their burdens and, in the silencing of the horror at the heart of the hotel, perhaps see redemption as well.
The story ends as it should, with the hurricane’s arrival. There’s sound and fury and everything on the brink, and then we are left with survivors carefully picking up the pieces. If there’s a bone to pick here it’s with the entity beneath the hotel itself. For all its malicious cleverness, it never quite manages to define itself. It’s left to the heroes to ascribe a personality rather than letting the entity do so, and so the threat feels a bit more distanced than it might have.
Fans of the Clockwork Century will find no doubt enjoy Jacaranda, particularly since it comes after the series’ official wrap-up in Fiddlehead. Weird West devotees will find it worthwhile as well, and even casual readers will find it a comfortable, engaging read. Only the nit-picky few will wish there had been a bit more to it – more to the interactions of the three heroes, and more to the monster, whose voice should have roared even louder than the storm.
(Subterranean, 2015)
