The Orchard

Oxrun Station #9

by Charles L. Grant

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Halloween, Audiobook, Short Stories, Supernatural

287 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Charles Lewis Grant was a novelist and short story writer specializing in what he called "dark fantasy" and "quiet horror." He also wrote under the pseudonyms of Geoffrey Marsh, Lionel Fenn, Simon Lake, Felicia Andrews, and Deborah Lewis.

Grant won a World Fantasy Award for his novella collection Nightmare Seasons, a Nebula Award in 1976 for his short story "A Crowd of Shadows", and another Nebula Award in 1978 for his novella "A Glow of Candles, a Unicorn's Eye," the latter telling of an actor's dilemma in a post-literate future. Grant also edited the award winning Shadows anthology, running eleven volumes from 1978-1991. Contributors include Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, R.A. Lafferty, Avram Davidson, and Steve Rasnic and Melanie Tem. Grant was a former Executive Secretary and Eastern Regional Director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and president of the Horror Writers Association.

Reviews

[Thomas Stroemquist · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was initially not much more than confused with the first story of the four (named "parts 1-4", but only quite loosely collected). Language is good and narrative pleasantly relaxed, but the story was a bit too abstract. This definitively picked up during the more engaging parts 2 and especially 3, which takes place in a strange movie theater. The last, set mainly in a mysterious hospital was another really good one.

So, despite my initial hesitation, the author and the book kind of won me over. The short story problem with characters being less than perfectly defined is certainly present here, but the atmospheric and dreamlike quality of the stories makes this not so much a problem. I did worry, however, that I was to be treated to some sort of conclusion, bringing the four stories or some of it's characters together, because I would probably have missed it. Actually, there may have been something to this effect and I did miss it I guess.

This was my October buddy read with my good friend Edward Lorn and, as always, a great experience. I'll just chalk up another author he introduced me to, because I'll be happy to read more of Grant in the future.

[Kimberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE ORCHARD, by Charles Grant re-visits the town of Oxrun, where "unnatural" is the norm. In this collection of 4, loosely-linked novellas, we are treated to a sampling of the town's unhealthy history--this time, an old orchard.

". . . it created images behind my eyes that I didn't want to see, didn't want to explore."

This is one of a series of Grant's books about Oxrun, but even out of "order" this particular book holds it's own with various incidents from different times. Grant is outstanding in the "quiet, creeping" horror field, and I can not recommend his work highly enough.

[Kevin Lucia · Rating 5 out of 5]

**Working my way through these again, harvesting the vibes...


CREEPY. And I'm totally behind the 8-ball, but I've just picked up on how the 1st person narrative bracketing these novellas is supposed to be Charles Grant himself, writing FROM Oxrun Station...

[Dark Recesses]

The Orchard by Charles L. Grant (1986 TOR Horror)
Review by Nickolas Cook

When 'quiet horror' was king, there were two main writers of the form: Charles L. Grant and Ramsey Campbell, each of whom put out some extraordinary genre classics throughout the 80s and early 90s. Both still practice this style, Campbell more prolifically in these latter years. But Grant was especially vocal in his insistence that all great horror was 'quiet', avoiding any reference to blood and guts in his aggregation of works. Some love it; some hate it. All have to agree this man can write like no one else in the industry.
Speaking of prolific: did you know that Grant has over thirty novels, collections, and edited anthologies to his name? If you haven't made time to read him and appreciate his consummate ability to entertainment, please find his books where ever you can and start today. For readers he is a dark treasure trove. For fellow scribes, he is a master of the form and can teach the craft.
"The Orchard" follows his 'quiet' code, as he demonstrates his literary prowess. Grant breaks the novel into several connective shorter works, all centered around the titular locale, situated in his mythical town of Oxrun Station. Each section can be read out of order, and still stand quite well on its own.
Grant begins the novel with a Prologue that sets the tone for the tales that follow, as an old man guides his younger friend out to the Orchard to tell his stories, "My Mary's Asleep", "I See Her Sweet and Fair", "The Last and Dreadful Hour", and "Screaming, in the Dark". The wraparound story is a favorite ploy for Grant, as he has used it in several classic anthology style novels, such as "Dialing the Wind", and became somewhat a professional stamp to his works.
Not all of the stories in "The Orchard" work on equal footing, and may even come off as a bit too obscure for some readers. But his craftsmanship is apparent, even if the moral isn't. The one that works best for me is "The Last Dreadful Hour", the tale of a man trapped in a haunted movie theater with other patrons, who begin to disappear one by one, or transform into nightmarish creatures. It is a truly nightmare like story, as the protagonist descends into madness, and then, finally, acceptance of his fate. The last line of this gem is worth the book alone. I actually felt a bit creeped out by the time I had finished it, a true rarity for a horror writer.
This is a great place to start with Grant. Some of his other works that might be of interest for the novice are "The Pet", "Dialing the Wind", and "The Long Night of the Grave". He also wrote several excellent tie-in novels for "The X-Files" (that show probably wouldn't have existed without Grant's trademark 'quiet' horror bestsellerdom) and a great series called "Black Oak", a sort of Peter Saxon like X-Files. Grant is also known for his genre building anthology series, "Shadows". With so much work to choose from, I don't think a reader can go wrong with any of his books.

--Nickolas Cook.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quiet horror. The fear that lingers. That chaotic flash in the midst of serenity. The quickest of movements out of the corner of your eye. You know that you know that you know, yet the word crazy runs through your mind. A waking dream. A silent nightmare filled with enduring dread. Take a walk through Oxrun Station, if you dare. When you see the Orchard, RUN!!!!

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three stars for the book Charles Grant actually wrote; five stars for my oblivious misreading of this entire anthology. It’s not hard to read The Orchard as phantasmagoria in the tradition of George MacDonald’s Lilith, rather than as a somewhat disjointed series of nightmarish vignettes, if one somehow gets the idea that the use of first-person narrative in the early part of the book is more significant than it actually is.

I was convinced this book followed the mind of one character, Herb, through a hallucinatory journey in a hellish dreamscape, and read a lot into the book that might not have been there. Herb’s story is the only one of the four told in first person, and I stupidly took this as an indication that it was he-in protean dreamform-who was moving through each of the subsequent stories. In my defense, there are thematic similarities throughout the stories that didn’t disabuse me of my confusion. All four stories involve a single man with attractions to more than one woman (one of whom is unavailable for one reason or another); there’s a consistent feeling of entrapment within a dream stylistically woven throughout the stories; and each story ends with a kind of percolating horror that seems to describe the vague passing of one dream into another. Additionally, I thought the climactic scene of the last story brought together several themes from the former stories in a grand guginol of alienation and loneliness.

My biggest misreading of this book concerns the ongoing male fantasy aspects in each of the stories. Since I read this book thinking that I was dealing with one dreaming character, I took the various protagonists’ relationships with women and sexuality to be aspects of a single character’s personality. I read too much into the book at this point, and thought Charles Grant was making points about society and relationships that just weren’t there. But, come on!, there’s a unicorn obsessed with dreams right in the middle of the book: that’s just setting up the credulous reader for a downfall. If I see a honking great unicorn screaming “this is a dream!” at me, I tend to believe him. That's probably the only thing a unicorn could say that one can take at face value.

In short, I was amazed at the book I thought I was reading, but let down by the book I actually read. Grant’s mastery of mood is worth checking out, but ignore the prologue and epilogue: they make the book corny.

[Nate · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars rounded up. This was my first Charles Grant read, and I'm really impressed. This was perfect for that September/Fall is Here vibe, and plenty spooky. I felt the transition from story to story was just a bit too disjointed at some points, but I loved the way everything tied together with the titular Orchard. This was part ghost story and part I'm going crazy because reality is no longer trustworthy. Highly recommended

[Mika Lietzen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first story I read by Charles L. Grant was "The Gentle Passing of a Hand" from Tales from the Nightside (1981), an exquisite story of a child who accidentally learns a magic trick that can both kill and resurrect. Admittedly a fable of the "be careful what you wish for" variety, it was Grant's style that made the biggest impression, communicating by hints and suggestion a story that felt both exhilaratingly fantastic and deeply tragic.

The same sublime style is used in The Orchard (1986), a collection of four novellas set in Grant's fictional town of Oxrun Station. The orchard of the title is an abandoned tract of land just outside the town, a place for teenage gatherings and surreptitious meetings. There's bad juju about the place, and it's suggested that it somehow causes the events that follow.

The first story, "My Mary's Asleep" tells the story of Herb and his crush on a girl called Mary, who's already in a relationship with one of Herb's friends. The crush is slightly disturbing, as Herb has chosen to carve a tomb effigy in the likeness of Mary for a school project. One night, as all the friends hang out at the orchard, Mary's boyfriend is run over by a car. And then Herb's other friends start dying as well, in different ways. It's a haunting story that builds beautifully to a strange, unexplained ending that can only disappoint.

The second story, "I See Her Sweet and Fair", is a story of a single-parent cop whose son is suspected of being a serial killer. Vacillating between two women, the policeman is finally forced to choose in a finale that apparently features a unicorn. No, it makes no sense.

The third story, "The Last and Dreadful Hour", ups the ante again. A group of spectators take shelter in a movie theater during a storm and a blackout. The doors are locked, but one by one people start disappearing, until only the main character is left. Again the set-up is brilliant, and again the story just trickles away at the end.

The fourth story, "Screaming, in the Dark" features an investigative journalist convalescing at a hospital after breaking his leg. A scared young kid is brought to the same room, and being an investigative type, the reporter starts to investigate the source of the scare. Blacker than black shadows are glimpsed, nurses change shape, and a girl who committed suicide comes for a visit. There's an almost cosmic crescendo to the events, but again... it all seems to amount to very little indeed. The collection is then topped off with an epilogue that references the cast of the novellas, a sort of where are they now section that attempts to give the characters some existence beyond their own stories.

Grant's writing is excellent throughout. There's a poetic quality to his prose, as exemplified by this passage from "Screaming, in the Dark":

Evening comes rapidly when the year begins to die - when the leaves have all turned and the grass bows against the wind and there's no memory of spring despite the gold left behind by the sun in its setting.

Evening comes, not with shadows but a slow killing of the light... and when the light has gone, the trees grow larger and streets become tunnels and porches on old houses no longer hold the swings and the rockers and the warm summer calls to come away, come and sit, and watch for a while.

And when the sidewalks are empty and the cars have all been parked and the only sign of movement is a leaf scratching at the curb, there are the sounds, the nightsounds, the last sounds before the end – of wings dark over rooftops, of footsteps soft around the corner, of something clearing its throat behind the hedge near the streetlamp where white becomes a cage and the shadows seldom move.

There are stars.
There is a moon.

There are late August wishes and early June dreams that slip out of time and float into the cold that turns dew to frost and hardens the pavement, gives echoes blade edges and makes children's laughter seem too close to screams.

In the evening; never morning.
When the year begins to die.

The repetition of certain phrases, the changes in rhythm, the imagery. That’s some serious writing right there. Grant is brilliant at evoking an ominous atmosphere in ordinary places and situations. But what does all that atmosphere amount to? Not much. The mood is set, the plot is put in gear, situations unfold – and then? Grant doesn’t elaborate, he merely hints. The trouble is that the reader is left grasping at straws, trying to draw conclusions out of half-glimpsed shadows.

Now I dont't need a great payoff, there doesn't need to be a monster or anything like that at the end of the book. But I do wish for something that would help with an interpretation. "The Gentle Passing of a Hand", I think, worked because it was, at its heart, a very basic story, something that the reader could deduce from the hints and suggestions. The stories of The Orchard are more complicated, there are no reference points, not much familiarity with the scenarios. In addition, the overarching theme of the orchard forces the reader to think that there should be something tangible to figure out in all this. And there isn't, not easily anyway. It's mostly just mood and mood alone.

Reading Grant can be frustrating. I simply adore his writing, in small doses anyway. No problem with the settings or the situations either. Plotting also works, up to a point. But after finishing a story I'm at a loss about what I just read. Nothing is explained, nothing revealed. Everything remains as opaque as in the beginning. And all I've witnessed is some really, really impressive shadowplay.

Read all my reviews at mikareadshorrorfiction.wordpress.com

[Neil Fulwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first encounter with Grant’s work and the best I can describe it is as if William Faulkner had binged on ‘The Twilight Zone’, lightened up the prose style and decided it was Halloween in Yoknapatawpha County. Lovely stuff!

[Иван Величков · Rating 5 out of 5]

Това ми е първа и определено не последна среща с литературата на Чарлс Л. Гранд и Оксрън Стейшън. Стилът му на писане е поетичен, леко тежък и определено ти влиза под кожата. Малко автори успяват да създадат такъв тих и изкарващ ти акъла ужас.
Овощната градина се развива в градчето Оксрън Стейшън, което е в основата на няколко авторови произведения. Група студенти решават да си направят пикник в изгоряла овощна градина с доста съмнителна репутация. Четирите истории за прогнилите плодове на този пикник. Нелогични самоубийства, мистериозни убийства, странна буря по време на късна кинопрожекция и обитавана болница ще скъсат нервите на читателя, който посмее да се потопи в есенния свят на Гранд.
Между другото, новелите са оказали силно влияние на редица сериали с паранормални елементи. Беше поучително да откривам приликите с определени епизоди и герои.

[Sidney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Intricate and surreal, building slow and deep chills. Grant’s subtle magic is in top form here, weaving together four tales all touched by the eerie orchard at the edge of his dark town OxRun Station. This is the horror of shadow and hints of dark forces, and if you get immersed in it, you’ll feel the darkness along with the doomed and damned.

[Jena · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hate to give this one star, but I was so confused by the plot!
I felt like I was in someone's stream of consciousness during a mental breakdown.
Maybe that was the point?
I heard the author speak on a podcast, and I liked him, and liked a lot of what he said about writing. So I'll give his books another try.
Maybe this one just wasn't for me.

[Bryan Cebulski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charles L. Grant remains undefeated in the goosebumpsiest purple pulp horror prose department. Plot? Who needs it! All you need is "An orchard--but spooky!", "A movie theater--but spooky!", and "A hospital--but spooky!" and I am all over it.

[Rachel Bea · Rating 4 out of 5]

more like 3.5 but I'll go in detail when I'm not on my phone and I can reflect on the book a bit more.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like Nightmare Seasons, this book is a collection of loosely connected novellas, bookended by a vignette of sorts that is intended to be Grant himself, learning more of the history of Oxrun Station. And like most collections of shorter works, there are some good stories, and some bad ones. The Orchard is split almost in half between the two.

The first novella, My Mary's Asleep, is pretty terrible. It features an unsympathetic protagonist who may not be the source of the horror in the story, but is still pathetic enough to be unlikable. That Grant tries to pull in a "fat man's revenge" theme into it makes the story that much less interesting. It could be said that the story establishes the orchard as the source of the supernatural for this collection, but that was already done in the prologue. Besides, what, exactly, was the supernatural element here? I felt more lost than anything else in this story.

I See Her Sweet and Fair, the second novella, had a good build-up, but the payoff for it was ridiculous. It's worth reading just to see how well Grant can create tension and keep you guessing, but goddamn if the ending didn't just make me laugh. This is horror, folks, not some kids' story, and if your big reveal just makes the reader laugh, then you're not doing it right.

It wasn't until the third novella, The Last and Dreadful Hour, that things started to show more promise. Here, Grant's abilities shine through, as he tells a slow, fateful story of people confined in a theater and slowly going missing in the dark. And unlike the previous story, this one has a conclusion that makes perfect sense without being obvious.

Screaming, in the Dark, was totally lost on me. It's about a guy in a hospital, possibly going crazy, but there are a lot of unanswered questions relating to the story to have a firm grasp of what the story was supposed to be about. I mean, I have a sense of the events, but I couldn't tell you what they were supposed to mean.

I'm not sure if the entire collection is worth reading, but the middle two stories are both winners, even if the first of the two has a ridiculous ending. I'm not sure if the shorter form works for or against Grant here, but either way, there are a couple of good, atmospheric horror stories here, bookended by a couple of terrible ones.

[Timothy G. Huguenin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love subtle, quiet horror and wanted to rate this more at a 4 or higher, but I just couldn't. I like Grant's writing, but his characters in this book really bugged me. In my life I have not encountered so many Young Attractive Women who blow kisses to men whenever they leave and enter a room (and Oxrun Station is awash in Young Attractive Women, kiss-blowing or otherwise, which is not my experience for most small towns). Nor have I met many women who would think it is funny for their date to make a joke about how good another woman might look naked. I don't remember the male protagonists in Nightmare Seasons being quite as horn-dog as these in The Orchard, which is why I haven't given up on Grant yet.

Even overlooking those faults, there's something about the stories that just don't quite jive with me the way I expected, given the high marks from other reviewers whose opinions I very much respect. I wish I could say objectively what is not connecting with me in this regard. I do appreciate Grant's style and subtlety and will try more of the Oxrun Station books, hoping that his male characters behave more reasonably.

Only one other complaint I have was with the third story, "The Last And Dreadful Hour". This one had in my mind the most potential for scares, but it disappointed me in the end (and I'm assuming I interpreted this right, please correct me if I missed something) with the extremely tenuous thematic connection (the Orchard is mentioned in passing by a character who is just barely in the story) and the IT'S ALL A DREAM IN SOMEONE ELSE'S HEAD trope (furthermore distancing the story from the connection to the Orchard). Now, I'm not completely opposed to dreamspace plots in general, but they must be done extremely well to work at all. I have a horror movie in mind that really executes this trope well, but naming it would unfortunately spoil the movie, so I can't recommend it by name.

Having said all that, I did enjoy the stories apart from the objective and subjective flaws I noted. I finished the book in two days. Not a huge accomplishment, as it is a short work, but it held my interest better than many other books. So I'm knocking down my rating from what could have been 4 stars to 2.5, rounded up to 3.

[Marti · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is probably the most confusing one I have ever read. The main character keeps changing. The one thing that I understand is that a group of friends go for a picnic in The Orchard, and then a number of them end up dying. The main character, toward the end, is in the hospital. I couldn't really care what happened, because I couldn't keep track of what was happening.

I got the wrong copy of The Orchard, which the book group will be reading, and decided to try it.

[Jeff Francis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Charles L. Grant’s “The Orchard” (1986) displays a little more innovation than its generic packaging might suggest. The novel is broken into four different sections telling individual stores tied together by the titular theme. Although the narrative is a tad hallucinatory and ethereal, the overall storytelling feat is impressive.

[Alec Hawkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is it a short story collection or is it a novel? Quintessential dark fantasy / quiet horror, perfect for readers who want to experience the genre. The atmosphere takes over the plot leaving the reader with a sense of having stepped into Grant’s Oxrun Station, Connecticut just long enough to be chilled to the bone. This book will linger in your mind like the hazy memories of a nightmare.

[BG Callahan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I will read opinions of other readers before commenting further...other than this. Some of the writing is sublimely poetic, lyrical, if dark, But the story structure made no sense to my Semi Autistic self. New wave? Abstract?

[Nik · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although the writing of Charles Grant has been heavily recommended I find it difficult as to Why?

This book is just a total mish mash of stories that have very little to do with an orchard.

Not at all impressed. Feel like I wasted my time reading this dross!

Sorry Charles.

[Carson Winter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great writing, dull stories. I would definitely give Grant another shot though, on the strength of his prose alone.

[Conal Cochran · Rating 3 out of 5]

Frustrating as heck, because Grant is a very good writer, and a very scary writer, and this book is good and scary and well-characterized, but so many of these tales fizzle out.

Look, I don't mind ambiguity or opacity in horror fiction. Writers like Ramsey Campbell, Robert Aickman, Lisa Tuttle, and Steve and Melanie Tem (and, to a lesser extent, Dennis Etchison) can all tell stories that don't make a lot of sense at the level of consciousness (even by the standards of supernatural fiction), but totally 'click' at a primal or preconscious level. Grant's stuff just. . .doesn't, most of the time.

It doesn't help that the framing device makes no sense, despite a strong start--there's a way to make the ripple effects of the picnic in the orchard work like it does in The Grudge, but there's no sense that any of the bad things that happen in the other three stories needed the tie-in to the orchard to happen. Nor is there a sense of moral luck really here so it's arbitrary in a bad way.

I don't need some sort of elaborate worldbuilding, but give me something to hang my hat on besides "the orchard is bad"--of course it's bad and spooky, we're in Oxrun Station! A more interesting throughline would have been that all four stories center around a sympathetic but frustrating male protagonist's issues with women in similar ways

Still, it's a good quick read, and suitably atmospheric and haunting. If I'm rambling on about the issues, it's that it reminds me of The X-Files (which Grant was a big fan of and wrote some expanded universe novels for)--impeccable atmosphere, strong mysteries, unnerving hints about doom and wrongness, all of which builds to a fizzle if anything.

[BRANDON · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been wanting to read The Orchard by Charles L. Grant for years, but it's hard to find horror audio books, much less older books. Well, last night, I finally figured out how to make my ebooks read themselves out loud. It's not perfect, the computerized voice is a little monotone, but I can now listen to all the books I've been hoarding for years. That being said The Orchard was a huge disappointment. I was expecting a story about a haunted apple orchard, what I got was three loosely interconnected fever dreams that were loosely connected to the orchard. If I had been trying to read the book I don't think I would have even finished it. Bummer. I am excited to pick out my next listen though.

[Jordan Anderson · Rating 1 out of 5]

If this is how Charles Grant always writes, I want no part in anything else he does.

The Orchard was a complete mess. It was outright confusing, jumping around at a schizophrenic pace and with such reckless abandon that I had literally zero idea what was going on, and, to be honest, after the first 80 pages, I didn’t even care. And even worse, after finishing it, I still don’t know what occurred.

Grant’s lyrical style could be good, but it’s just too dense and wordy for a book that felt 3 times longer than it’s measly 286 pages.

I know Grant is heralded as one of the best of the 80’s horror boom but I ain’t seeing it and I ain’t drinking the kool-aid.

[Jay Rothermel · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Orchard presents five interconnected novellas. Each in some way relates to a blighted orchard, overgrown and wild, no longer owned after the previous farmer's death. Whatever exists in the orchard and reaches out in myriad ways to affect the protagonists is inexplicable, or at least never explained. But it's affects in four cases are horrifying, open-ended, and easily fill the reader with a creeping dread. Ambiguity in four climaxes underscores four separate encounters with an unknown. Grant allows us to parse the orchard as culprit, but also four -- or more -- human minds.

[Robert Furlong · Rating 3 out of 5]

Each of the four stories in this book were gripping, and it was common for me to read them start to finish without breaks because I was too invested by the great storywriting. However, the ending to each one was incredibly unsatisfying. There's an epilogue that tells you who did and did not survive, but not why, and although I have a theory as to what happened in the stories there wasn't nearly enough detail in them for me to be confident in that theory.

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars, closer to 3

A collection of 4 tangentially related stories that really offer more questions than answers, but are vaguely "spooky". Kinda like a bad horror movie. The epilogue that seems to try and tie everything together just adds more questions. Kinda meh, tbh

[Frank · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’m confused. Writing was fluid and easy read but come on.

[Joshua Rainey · Rating 2 out of 5]

More a 2.5 than a 2.