Soul Eater

by K.W. Jeter

Soul Eater Jeter, K. W.

Genres: Horror, Fantasy, Fiction, Manga

294 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Kevin Wayne Jeter (born 1950) is an American science fiction and horror author known for his literary writing style, dark themes, and paranoid, unsympathetic characters. He is also credited with the coining of the term "Steampunk." K. W. has written novels set in the Star Trek and Star Wars universe, and has written three (to date) sequels to Blade Runner.

Series:
* Doctor Adder

Series contributed to:
* Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
* Alien Nation
* Blade Runner
* Star Wars: The Bounty Hunter Wars
* The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror
* The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror

Reviews

[mark monday · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is a fascinating horror novel about adults who won't let go and kids who have to pay the price. the novel literalizes the idea of parents living their lives at the expense of their children: appalling thrill-seeker Renee may now be virtually braindead, but she still wants to live the wild life, even if that means inhabiting the mind of her daughter, bending that little body to her will and sucking her soul away, bit by bit. Renee was a student of the left-hand path and those lessons served her well; fortunately for her daughter, Renee's ex-husband is willing to literally give up everything to free their child of this puppeteer.

the book is grim, grimy, and unpleasant. and very well-written. the scenes of Renee's practice run mind controlling her sister were difficult for me to read, they were so full of the complete degradation of a person's body and spirit. Jeter makes this novel a compelling and fearful experience, full of night sweats and terrible dreams. he was clearly committed to maintaining a certain kind of narrative, one that doesn't spell things out for his readers, and to creating a certain kind of atmosphere, one of creeping dread and feelings of imminent doom. his vision of an unspoken fraternity of divorced fathers, only somewhat in their children's lives, moodily traveling the freeways on Fridays and Sundays, was a surprising concept. even more striking is the novel's central location: a failed suburban planning experiment now mainly empty, the funders out of money halfway through the project, leaving only the skeletons of homes that will never be lived in. and at the heart of that dead neighborhood, a body in a coma, hooked to feeding tubes, nearly dead itself but still desperately yearning for life. never have I read a will to survive depicted so repulsively. just die already, monster!

the strange and perfect collage art cover on my edition is by Dave McKean, whose covers for Sandman disturbed and enchanted me when much younger.

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Soul Eater took quite a bit to get into, with Jeter giving us lots of what appear to be unrelated dream sequences; only later do these start to make sense. Perhaps this narrative style explains the wide array of ratings here, for Jeter forces you to make an effort; the question then becomes whether or not the effort pays off. I liked it in the end.

Our main protagonist, David, has absorbed some strange punches over the years. He separated from his wife 5 years prior and his daughter Dee went with his mother, who moved back to the old family estate. David only sees Dee on the weekends. About a year before this starts, David's wife Renee had something like a stroke and now exists as a vegetable, being cared for by her sister Carol (who also lives in the old family manse). What triggers the action concerns little Dee, age 10 or so, who one night almost stabbed her father to death in his sleep; he awoke just in time to stop the knife, but the string of profanities she then shouted shook him perhaps even further. What the hell has gotten into little Dee?

While this may sound like a creepy kid story, those being oh so popular at the time this was written (1983), Dee is simply the tip of the iceberg that David discovers. This is a bit spoilery, but Renee and her brother Jess seemed to have been into some strange foo, studying with a guru of sorts to learn the secret of having your soul live after the body fails. Well, Renee and Jess took the 'left path' or 'dark way', seeking to obtain the ability to transfer their souls to others, blood relatives being the easiest. So, is Renee, lying comatose in bed, up to something naughty? It surely seems so, and the focus seems to be little Dee...

Jeter did manage to build some good tension here, and even a good creep factor, but it took some time to establish this; the last half of the novel moved nicely, however. A possession novel of a sort, but not one rooted in demons and such, deftly touching an old horror trope but giving it a new spin. Jeter also gives us here some super creepy scenes, but I will leave these for the reader to discover. Jeter does leave several questions unanswered by the denouement or I might have rated this higher. 3.5 possessed stars!

[Brandon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Soul Eater 

By K.W. Jeter
Tor Books. 1983.


From my perspective, the Horror paperback boom of the 70s, 80s and 90s, had three major publishers. This would be Tor, Zebra and Leisure. Of course, there are many others, and in fact, my favorite publishers, as far as track record for what I enjoy in horror reading, isn't even one of these, but these three were pumping out more horror novels than any others. 


From what I've read, Tor is largely the higher brow product, focusing on more subtle, quiet horror novels. Frankly, the authors are more talented in prose and delivery overall. 


The bad news is that that is hardly what I'm looking for when I read one of these. I want to be excited, to be scared, to feel chills and most importantly of all, I don't want to be bored. 


And here I am, for what feels like the millionth time, being bored with a Tor book. 


Soul Eater hardly feels like a horror novel at all. It's more of a family drama with some poorly-explained supernatural overtones. Jeter is an excellent writer when it comes to fund of knowledge with vocabulary and throws in a few cool curve balls, but overall I couldn't wait for this thing to end. 


Here we've got the story of a divorced Dad, who gets his child on the weekends. His ex-wife is in a coma and basically on her deathbed, while her primary caregiver is an aunt. The kid starts to act exceedingly weird, and it turns out she's been possessed by her evil comatose mother. A little bit of chaos ensues, but mostly just a bunch of dream sequences pack these pages. Something about crystalized souls or something…


I don't know. It's not the worst, but I didn't have much fun. Can't really recommend it, but if it's cheap, I wouldn't slap you for giving it a try. 

[Wayne · Rating 2 out of 5]

This should have been called Time Waster instead. A story about possession that falls flat. Uninteresting characters. Dull settings. Very little possession. Although talk about soul crystallizing and possession abound. No thrills until the end.

The first fourth of this book is lacking in everything. Tiresome narration with nothing to make it stand out. Then it sort of kicks in. A father is attacked by his young daughter who is possessed by her mother. This goes away though to be replaced by a child custody story. Very boring. Man on the run with child. "How will I make it." "Where will I Go." Not what I want in my horror book. This keeps going until the end of the book. The ending does have some excitement to it. Not enough to lift this above a 1.5/2 star book. Avoid.

[iambehindu · Rating 2 out of 5]

David Pringle included Soul Eater in his Best Of Modern Fantasy 1984 volume. Although, I’m not sure why. He does praise Jeter for the right reasons, who is excellent with character and sociologically excavated environments.

Jeter broke through all of the conservative and stylistic pitfalls of science fiction with his masterpiece Dr. Adder. Even with Seeklight, Jeter showed an intelligent and idiosyncratic command of the form. Perhaps his pivot to horror was by suggestion of an editor, but even if the passion to attend to the genre was present, he gave us a standard and rather unremarkable horror novel.

Unfortunately, there is just not much to say here. Soul Eater is forgettable, predictable, riddled with info-dumps, and composed around what appears to be an adherence to trend as opposed to originality. Jeter’s science fiction novels tell us he is absolutely capable of immeasurably stronger and more thoughtful writing. I will avoid his horror output going forward.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Soul Eater' (1983) was a great improvement on Jeter's previous romp, 'Morlock Night' (1979), which we have already reviewed but it is a very different book. Instead of outrageous fantasy, Jeter offers us a form of horror naturalism grounded in early 1980s Los Angeles.

When reading a horror novel, it is often useful to distinguish the underlying real fears and anxieties that provoke what is necessarily either fantastic or extreme or both (the covert agenda) from the overt narrative - the tale placed before our eyes intended to excite or unnerve.

The overt narrative is a tale of soul possession by the ultimate evil, a clearly unstable mummy/wife who has sought immortality through the 'left hand path' and returns to try to possess any in her bloodline, including her young daughter, to meet her needs.

The key to the story is that she is in coma after her experimentation goes wrong. She possesses as a form of living corpse so we are close here to having an unusual variant of the zombie genre - she is supposed to have died and returned from somewhere that she has no intention of returning to.

Jeter writes (except in one area) exceptionally well as he tells his story from the point of view of the husband and father left behind, Braemar, struggling with life in any case but committed to his daughter and, so we would like to think but this is not so clear, his new partner, Sarah.

He resists the fantastic reality that faces him which allows a great deal of tension to build up, leading to a cataclysmic finale that genuinely grips the reader and which is almost cinematic in potential. There are twists and turns that do surprise (though perhaps they should not in retrospect).

The 'covert' horror (repeated through references throughout the story) is about male anxiety. We are not entirely sure what is going on here but the general sense is of fathers and husbands left adrift and depressed by the collapse of relationships and the effects on their children.

The presumption that women are best fitted to raise a child (the cultural assumption then even more than now) is undermined by this narrative, not entirely but enough to allow a man to write of the possibility, at least, of the evil and manipulative female.

This 'evil mummy' back from the dead (maybe the clue is in the word 'mummy') seems to hold all the cards once she has reached a certain level of power and this too adds to the tension. Right until the very end, we are not sure whether she will win or not. I shall not tell you if she does.

Jeter does not seem to be writing personally (he is a very private man) since he seems to have been happily married since the 1970s until his wife's death relatively recently. It seems, as an imaginative writer, he was just picking up on a male anxiety of the period or perhaps some private 'if' fear.

There is one very clever bit of writing that creates a very different sort of discomfort. Braemar attempts to escape the evil by going on a road trip that echoes Nabokov's 'Lolita'. The evil Renee shows that such an escape is not possible and offers something that makes the skin crawl.

Already having turned a hated sister into a prostituted sex object by inhabiting her body, Renee offers a possessed child-daughter to Braemar as sex-object under her control, This is evil beyond evil and triggers Braemar into an existential self-sacrificing decision to deal with the monster.

The naturalism of Jeter's narrative shifts the slow burn of horror we develop around Humbert Humbert into a short sharp understanding of the depravity of an evil returned from the grave that exists as the potential for an immortal malevolence. You do not get darker than that!

And the literary weakness - only that, when he ceases to offer us a naturalist account of the complex and deranged family dynamic, we have passages which (although clearly comprehensible once the whole story is known) are a little too obscure but this is a minor misjudgement.

Overall, if you stick with it, an accomplished horror novel that manages to be claustrophobic and yet hint at the cosmic. The malevolence of the evil soul at the heart of the story especially in relation to the young daughter genuinely unnerves the reader.