Pay The Piper
by George Romero & Daniel Kraus
Union Square & Co., 2024
328 pages
Young Adult
Pay The Piper paints a picture of everyday life in a place that was never mistaken for safe, where you can smell the supernatural just below the surface but never see it for years and years until one night it reaches out for vengeance upon the living.
What makes great writing to me, more so than a high-concept or the complexity of the layers of a twisty mystery, are the little things that characters reflect on, outlooks that convey their personality, metaphors that betray their past, or observations that might bring something familiar to the forefront of the reader’s mind. Those little nuances abound in this book, allowing us to quickly gain a feeling for the characters, their vulnerabilities, and their desire to leave the leaky, hundred-year-old pirate shanties of Alligator Point.
George Romero started writing this dark fantasy, a story without zombies, but he never got to finish it off. Now, author Daniel Kraus put the cherry on top, a good choice of authors to finish off the tale given his history of weird fiction. It’s delivered at a young adult level despite the main character’s over-the-top language. Written through the eyes of a girl who goes by the name Pontiac, it tells the story of a community of people who are trying to escape the poverty of the Point, but something won’t let them, even as the oil man starts buying up the locals’ property. Soon, Pontiac’s friends start to go missing.
The mix of hoodoo and bibles, the full palette of skin shades, the varied accents of the Bayou region are all handled with a relish for the diversity of culture that makes this Southern Gothic so engaging.
Something is out in the swamp muck. Something that lures you to come out to it in the darkness, tempts you with exactly what you want. But why? Are the Pointers all under a curse? Is something seeking revenge? Is it just the malevolent spirit of the swamp? The legend of the Piper has been there as long as anyone has been keeping track, along with those graffiti octopuses everywhere. We don’t know what’s happening, but we can feel a reckoning coming. The Piper wants to be paid. The swamp wants to keep its people right where they belong. Because there is a price to pay. In blood.
And in a drunken fit, Pontiac’s father just downed a bottle hidden under the sink that his daughter had been caring for. Old Doc told her it was a spirit that needed tending. What was it that her dad swallowed that gave him the strength to get his daughter out of the rot… and what will happen when it draws the pair back to the swamp?
Romero’s work generally has a moral. Sometimes it’s veiled, (dehumanization, materialism…) sometimes it’s right in your face, (like the corporate greed in City of the Dead,) and this is no exception, but there seem to be two distinct angles he’s getting at here. I think both are appropriate, but it’s confusing, and the ending might have played out better if one message had culminated at a different time to allow the second to build and have a stronger impact on denouement.
Pay The Piper is the effective Lovecraftian Bayou Gothic we’ve been waiting for. It’s a slow burn as the book feeds us the backstory we need to understand the confrontation that is about to unfold, but while reading the book, I didn’t feel the slog of a long build-up because I felt immersed in the lives of the characters, rooting for them to overcome their personal challenges and break free of the backwaters that were sucking them down. I wanted Pontiac and her dad, with her godfather and her school teacher to find a solution to the disappearing kids and survive the long-awaited reckoning with the sins of their forefathers.
Right now, I want everyone who reads this book to start spray painting octopuses on walls everywhere in defiance of Big Oil.
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