Black Sabbatical

by Anthony Ambrogio

The 1934. The Moradamee, Michigan’s most haunted county. Vyvyan Stroker has come here to be with her spouse, Professor Abe Stroker, who’s spending his sabbatical leave in this cursed backwater to research the Dark Lover of the Swamp (“not one but many”), who leads maidens to their destruction by promising them their heart’s desire.Vyvyan and Abe’s marriage and mettle are tested by their time in Mordamee, where they encounter a series of supernatural incidents and a host of local characters, all tied up in one way or another to the Dark Lover or the swamp—or both.Spader Sodcleft, town drunk and gravedigger, who knows where all the bodies are buried—literally and figuratively.Roly Hogworm, village idiot—who reminds Vyvyan, cryptically, that the Dark Lover has a sister.The Reverend Fyron Brimmeston, a hellfire preacher with an unhealthy fixation on the painting hanging in the Strokers’ rented cottage.Doc Birney, country physician, who befriends the family and, being an outsider himself (having lived in Mordamee for only 40 years), is perhaps the most normal person in town (except for his anthropomorphic fetishizing of his automobile, Ol’ Betsy).The Widow Wycherly, a crotchety herbalist suspicious of the townsfolk (and vice versa)—not to mention outsiders like Vyvyan. She nonetheless ministers to the Strokers when they’re overcome (via supernatural agency) by the “green misery.”Auda, Mrs. Wycherly’s granddaughter, a sweet, naïve young woman who’s hired by Abe as his housekeeper, befriended by Vyvyan, and pregnant by (she says) a handsome stranger who lay with her last spring and has promised to return in a year for her and the baby.Lon Norder, Mordamee’s stalwart sheriff, who saves the family from an impossible beast and develops an immediate rapport with Vyvyan—which blossoms into a full-fledged affair (which doesn’t end well).Violet Crabtree, Mordamee’s vibrant, vivacious schoolteacher, a self-possessed young woman who manages to charm everyone she meets, from the men (with whom she flirts) to the young women like Auda (whom she impresses with her manner and style)—everyone, that is, except Vyvyan, who tries to like Miss Crabtree but finds her somehow perverse.Strange and perverse incidents inform their year in Mordamee, culminating, one spring night when temperatures are topsy-turvy (cold by day, hot at night), with the disappearance of Auda’s baby, the long-awaited appearance of the Dark Lover, awful revelations and confrontations, and a superhuman struggle between unadulterated evil and the fallible forces of good.

523 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 20, 2020

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

An Entertaining Multi-Layered Read!

Anthony Ambrogio’s Black Sabbatical begins in 1934, carrying readers along with Vyvyan Stroker and her daughter, Desiderata, on a wild train ride from nightmare to nostalgia, horror to human nature—and that’s only in the first several pages. We learn that Vyv is plagued by a frightening and sexual dream in which a vegetal villain overcomes her, that her professor husband Abe (yes, his full name is Abraham Stroker—names in this novel are puns, great fun to puzzle out) is ensconced in the backwoods town of Mordamee (a pun warning un-fun developments) to study the legend of The Dark Lover of the Swamp despite the doubts and mockery of his university’s humanities department, that Vyv despises the “wife” culture of said university and other misogynistic tendencies of the time, and that Desi is a precocious 8-year-old with a penchant for song (from Popeye’s theme to a risqué ditty about the Dark Lover). In these early pages lie the seeds of this horror novel’s main themes and topics, which sprout and flourish in the form of cultural comment, historic cultural references (film, food, & more), commentary on feminism, family dynamics, desire, sexual innuendo (and plenty of straight-up sex)—all grown in a garden lush with wordplay and humor and a whole lot of laughs.

In fact, the entire novel is a rollicking ride with the brilliant and independent Vyv at its center. In Vyv, Ambrogio presents a feminist before her time: she works, is (mostly) unashamed of her sexual appetite, and questions local and other frustrating mores, motherhood, and her own marriage. She’s fallible but possesses a strong moral compass, is brave and generous of heart, and in all, is one of horror’s most multi-dimensional final girls—no, let’s say final women. The diminutive cannot contain our Vyv.

After daylight has died in “an agony of purple,” and the train departs (or perhaps flees) Mordamee, Vyv and Desi wait alone on the deserted station platform, and a sense of the uncanny falls. In the torpid summer night, Vyv encounters two of Ambrogio’s odd cast of characters: the town drunk and gravedigger, Spader Sodcleft, and the village idiot, Roly Hogworm. Creepy and ghoulish, each appears suddenly, and, while they eventually turn out to be harmless, readers will feel every bit of Vyv’s fear and disgust, her desire to protect herself and her daughter, and her anger at Abe who’s failed to collect them. The scene provides fertile ground in which the supernatural and merely strange may take root.

And so begins the Strokers’ year in Mordamee, with its verdant and oft dangerous swamp, home to the glorious night-blooming eldeshovsury or auda flower, which bears “no scent except perhaps for the faint aroma of earth, a hint of the dark secrets of the soil,” and whose enormous blossoms of “velvet-feathery petals like large wings of jet black and pure white, shot through with deep-red veins” portend the arrival of a familiar sort of monster—but not quite. Ambrogio doesn’t settle for standard. The Dark Lover of the Swamp transcends ordinary tropes.

Vyv, Desi, and readers soon meet a bevy of Mordamee’s unusual citizens: friendly Doc Birney and his magical car, Ol’ Betsy; herb- and suspicion-wielding Widow Wycherly and her sweet, pregnant granddaughter, Auda; wholesome Sheriff Lon Norder and not-so-wholesome Reverend Fyron Brimmeston; beguiling schoolmarm Violet Crabtree, her schoolroom full of children, and said children’s parents (the latter wholly entrapped by superstition and strange customs); Auda’s odd baby boy; and finally, the Dark Lover himself. (Dear readers, remember well the song Desi sings on the train [not the Popeye one...] as the story progresses!)

Black Sabbatical hits all the marks of quality horror and then some. In it, truth and legend, love and sex, fear and humor coexist, providing an excellent backdrop before which characters grow, relationships develop, sense conquers superstition, and, when necessary, superstition and belief in the supernatural supersede sense to save the day.