by Davis Grubb
Vintage Movie Classics spotlights classic films that have stood the test of time, now rediscovered through the publication of the novels on which they were based.
Movie Adaptation of Davis Grubb’s
THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER
1955: Produced by Paul Gregory. Directed by Charles Laughton. Starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, and Lillian Gish. Screenplay by James Agee.
Davis Grubb
THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER
Davis Grubb (1919–1980) was an American short-story writer and novelist. Born in Moundsville, West Virginia, he moved to New York City in 1940 to be a writer. His stories were published in magazines such as Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, and Woman’s Home Companion, and in three collections. The Night of the Hunter, the first of his ten novels, was an instant bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award. Some of his short stories were adapted for television on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and Rod Serling’s Night Gallery; his novel Fools’ Parade was the basis for a 1971 film starring James Stewart.
BOOKS BY DAVIS GRUBB
STORY COLLECTIONS
Twelve Tales of Suspense and the Supernatural
The Siege of 318: Thirteen Mystical Stories
You Never Believe Me and Other Stories
NOVELS
The Night of the Hunter
A Dream of Kings
The Watchman
The Voices of Glory
A Tree Full of Stars
Shadow of My Brother
The Golden Sickle
Fools’ Parade
The Barefoot Man
Ancient Lights
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JULY 2015
Copyright © 1953 by Davis Grubb, copyright renewed 1981 by Louis Grubb as Executor of the Estate of Davis Grubb
Foreword copyright © 2015 by Julia Keller
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Harper & Brothers, New York, in 1953. This edition published by arrangement with the Estate of Davis Grubb.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Movie Classics and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.
Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-101-91005-4
eBook ISBN 978-1-101-91006-1
Cover design: Evan Gaffney Design
Cover photograph © Glasshouse Images/Superstock
www.vintagebooks.com
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Contents
Cover
About the Author
Books by Davis Grubb
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Dedication
Epigraph
Book One: The Hanging Man
Book Two: The Hunter
Book Three: The River
Book Four: A Strong Tree With Many Birds
Epilogue: They Abide
FOREWORD
Davis Grubb’s Lost Masterpiece
by Julia Keller
If you close your eyes and throw a stick while standing in the forest of American popular culture, you’ll hit a million serial killers, give or take. In novels and TV shows, in movies and comic books and ballads and video games, there are constant iterations of the ruthless, machinelike murderer who whips through a victim list with perverse efficiency and no residual guilt. From the Hannibal Lecter novels of Thomas Harris to the TV series Criminal Minds to the Wes Craven film franchise featuring that fiend-in-a-fedora Freddy Krueger, serial killers are everywhere—hiding in toolsheds, penning come-hither Craigslist ads, serving you a sumptuous dinner while fingering the carving knife behind your back. The true-crime genre is similarly besotted with these rapacious, cackling masterminds, these damaged souls of diabolical intent, who kill again and again simply because they get a kick out of it.
But to see how a writer might, with originality and audacity, turn that stereotype into the catalyst for a penetrating, atmospheric exploration of Depression-era poverty and human depravity, read The Night of the Hunter by Davis Grubb. First published in 1953, it’s a neglected masterpiece, a gem that somehow got lost in the back of literature’s kitchen drawer along with the stray buttons and the tarnished spoons and the spare pennies.
Chances are you’re familiar with the title, but you may know it best as the moniker of the 1955 film version of the book. The movie stars Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, and Lillian Gish and is generally regarded as a noir classic. Dominated by Mitchum’s slow-burn depiction of the sinister predator with l-o-v-e tattooed on the knuckles of one hand and h-a-t-e on the other, the movie is so stark, so viscerally menacing, that the novel upon which it is based has drifted far out of the spotlight.
That’s a shame, because The Night of the Hunter is a gorgeous gut-punch of a book, a crime novel and ghost story and morality tale all rolled into one. It’s an ugly-beautiful work that pays scant attention to narrative niceties such as proper punctuation. It’s rough-hewn, melodramatic, and wildly entertaining, with some crucial social commentary tucked in there, too, like a precious coin smuggled in a raggedy old sock.
Pearl and John are a sister and brother being raised by their mother, Willa, in Cresap’s Landing, a sorrowful speck of a town along the Ohio River near Moundsville, West Virginia. This is the Great Depression—a time, notes one of the book’s characters, that has “turned up the undersides of some mighty respectable folks.” The children’s father, Ben Harper, has just been executed for a murder committed in the course of an armed robbery. No one knows where Ben hid the money he stole.
While Ben was in prison, his cellmate was a creepy, twisted, God-haunted wreck of a man who calls himself Preacher. Once Preacher is free, he seeks out Ben’s children, certain that they know the location of the dough. Preacher woos and wins Ben’s widow—while John watches in mounting terror, immune to Preacher’s charms. Indeed, the man’s very presence puts “the smell of dread in his nose” until “doglike his flesh gathered and bunched at the scent of it.” Soon John and Pearl are on the run across the Ohio River Valley, desperate to escape what the novel calls “something as old and dark as the things on the river’s bed, old as evil itself.”
Grubb based The Night of the Hunter on the real-life case of Harry F. Powers, a serial killer who preyed upon middle-aged widows. Powers was hanged for his crimes in 1932 at the state penitentiary in Moundsville, West Virginia—Grubb’s hometown—but the case continues to intrigue. Most recently, Jayne Anne Phillips imagined the inner lives of some of Powers’s victims, a widow and her children from Park Ridge, Illinois, in her 2013 novel Quiet Dell.
There is often a timeless quality to great fiction, a sense that the story could be occurring anywhere, to anyone, but there is also fiction that belongs right where the author put it. The Night of the Hunter is set during the Depression, and it is soaked with a stain of urgent necessity, with the recklessness and sorry compromising brought on by lack of money. Like any good psychopath, Preacher takes advantage of the family’s economic troubles; he knows that Willa is in no position to refuse his advances—not if she wants to be able to feed her children.
To a world that routinely gorges itself on lurid spectacles of fictional gore, The Night of the Hunter is a reminder of the power of the less explicit. Grubb doesn’t
need to show us shredded flesh or shattered skulls or writhing intestines to create revulsion and fear. He doesn’t need the grotesque. Instead he relies upon the insinuating force of evocative language: “Something had moved in the dark and secret world of night: something like the quick soft break and gasp of a sudden blowing flame in a coal grate in the dead of a winter’s night.”
Serial killers come and go in popular culture, and rarely rise above the banal, but Preacher is something special. Eager for the next kill, he waits for God to give him the go-ahead—“Is it time yet, Lord? Time for another widow? Say the word, Lord! Just say the word and I’m on my way!” Sometimes, as when he surveys a prostitute whose pale neck seems to beckon the knife he keeps in his pocket, Preacher is overwhelmed: “There were too many of them. He couldn’t kill a world.”
Killing a world: Was there ever a better, more succinct mission statement for a serial killer, for the kind of criminal whose compulsions come in bunches and never let him go? Grubb’s novel is about a dark soul in a dark time, and it is about, too, the solace of fighting back against that darkness, and of “knowing that children are man at his strongest, that they are possessed, in those few short seasons of the little years, of more strength and endurance than God is ever to grant them again.” In other words: Game on. Let the hunter’s night commence.
—
An earlier version of this essay was read on National Public Radio. West Virginia native Julia Keller is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of a series of novels set in Appalachia, the most recent of which is Last Ragged Breath.
To my mother
Where do murderers go, man!
Who’s to doom when the judge himself
is dragged to the bar?
—MELVILLE, Moby-Dick
BOOK ONE
THE HANGING MAN
Wilt thou forgive that sinne by which I have wonne Others to sinne? and, made my sinne their door?
—DONNE, “A Hymne to God the Father”
A child’s hand and a piece of chalk had made it: a careful, child’s scrawl of white lines on the red bricks of the wall beside Jander’s Livery Stable: a crude pair of sticks for the gallows tree, a thick broken line for the rope, and then the scarecrow of the hanging man. Some passing by along that road did not see it at all; others saw it and remembered what it meant and thought solemn thoughts and turned their eyes to the house down the river road. The little children—the poor little children. Theirs were the eyes for which the crude picture was intended and they had seen it and heard along Peacock Alley the mocking child rhyme that went with it. And now, in the kitchen of that stricken house, they ate their breakfast in silence. Then Pearl stopped suddenly and frowned at her brother.
John, finish your mush.
John scowled, pressing his lips together, while their mother stared out the window into the yellow March morning that flowered in the dried honeysuckle along the window. A cold winter sun shot glistening rays among the early mists from the river.
John, eat your mush.
Be quiet, Pearl! cried Willa, mother of them. Leave John be. Eat your own breakfast and hush!
Yet John frowned still, watching as the little girl resumed eating, and would not let the matter lie.
You’re only four and a half, Pearl, he said. And I’m nine. And you got no right telling me.
Hush, John.
Willa filled the blue china cup with sputtering hot coffee and sipped the edge of it, curling her nose against the steam. And then Pearl remembered again the picture on the brick wall beside Jander’s Livery Stable down at Cresap’s Landing. Pearl made them listen to the song about the hanging man.
Hing Hang Hung! See what the hangman done! chanted the little girl, and Willa, whirling, slammed the sloshing cup to the black stove top and struck the child so the four marks of her fingers were pink in the small flesh.
Don’t you ever sing that! Ever! Ever! Ever!
Willa’s poor, thin hands were knotted into tight blue fists. The knuckles shone white like the joints of butchered fowl. Pearl would have wept but it seemed to her that now, at last, she might get to the heart of the matter and so withheld the tears.
Why? she whispered. Why can’t I sing that song? The kids down at Cresap’s Landing sing it. And John said—
Never you mind about what John said. God in heaven, as if my cross wasn’t hard enough to bear without my own children—his own children—mocking me with it! Now hush!
Where’s Dad?
Hush! Hush!
But why won’t you tell? John knows.
Hush! Hush your mouth this minute!
Willa struck the child’s plump arm again as if, in so doing, she might in some way obliterate a fact of existence—as if this were not a child’s arm at all but the specific implement of her own torment and despair. Now Pearl wept in soft, faint gasps, and clutching her old doll waddled off, breathless with outrage, into the cold hallway of the winter house. John ate on in pale indifference, yet obscurely pleased with the justice. Willa glared pathetically at him.
And I don’t want you telling her, John, she whispered hoarsely. I don’t want you breathing a word of it—you hear? I don’t want her ever to know.
He made no reply, eating with a child’s coarse gusto; smacking his lips over the crackling mush and maple sirup.
You hear me, John? You hear what I said?
Yes’m.
And, despite the sole and monstrous truth which loomed in his small world like a fairy-book ogre, despite the awareness which for so many weeks had crowded out all other sentiments (even the present sweet comfort of breakfast in his mother’s steamy kitchen), John could not help finding a kind of cruel and mischievous joy as the lilt and ring of Pearl’s chant pranced like a hurdy-gurdy clown in his head: Hing Hang Hung! See what the hangman done. Hung Hang Hing! See the robber swing.
It was the song the children sang: all the children at Cresap’s Landing except, of course, John and Pearl. It was the song that was made by the children whose hands had made the chalk drawing on the red brick wall by Jander’s Livery Stable. John finished his milk in a single gulp and took the cup and plate to Willa by the sink.
Now, she said, I’m going up to Moundsville to see your dad. Lunch is in the pantry. I’ll be home to get you supper but I might not get back till late. John, I want you to mind Pearl today.
John, already heavy with responsibility for his sister, saw no reason to further acknowledge this bidding.
Hear, John? Mind her, now. And you, Pearl. Mind what John tells you. He’ll give you your lunch at noon.
Yes.
And mind what else I told you, John. Don’t breathe a word about—you know.
No’m.
Hing Hang Hung, he thought absently. (Why, it was almost a dancing tune.) Hung Hang Hing! See the robber swing. Hing Hang Hung! Now my song is done.
Willa by the brown mirror over the old chest of drawers tucked her chestnut curls into the wide straw hat with the green band.
Can Pearl and me play the Pianola?
Yes, but mind you don’t tear the rolls, John. They was your dad’s favorites.
She caught her breath, choking back a sob as she powdered her nose slowly and stared back into the wild, grieving eyes in the mirror. Why, it was almost as if Ben would ever hear them again: those squeaky, wheezy old Pianola rolls, almost as if he had just gone off on a fishing trip and would soon be back to play them and laugh and there would be those good old times again. She bit her lip and whirled away from the face in the mirror.
—And don’t let Pearl play with the kitchen matches! she cried and was gone out the door into the bitter morning. When the gray door was closed John stood listening for the chuckle-and-gasp, and then the final cough-and-catch and the rising whine of the old Model T. Pearl appeared in the hall doorway with the ancient doll in her arms, its chipped and corroded face not unlike her own just now that was streaked with tears in faint, gleaming stains down her plump cheeks. John listened to the old car
whining off up the river road to Moundsville. Pearl snuffled.
Come on, Pearl, John said cheerfully. I’ll let you play the Pianola.
She stumped solemnly along behind him into the darkened parlor amid the ghostly shapes of the muslin-draped furniture gathered all round like fat old summer women. The ancient Pianola towered against the wall by the shaded window like a cathedral of fumed oak. John opened the window blind an inch to shed a bar of pale winter light on the stack of long boxes where the music was hidden. Pearl squatted and stretched a fat hand to take one.
No, he said gently. Let me, Pearl. Mom said they wasn’t to be tore—and besides you can’t read what them names say!
Pearl sighed and waited.
Now this here one, he announced presently, lifting a lid from the long box and gently removing the thick roll of slotted paper. This here is a real pretty one.
And he fitted the roll into the slot and snapped the paper into the clip of the wooden roll beneath and solemnly commenced pumping the pedal with his stubby shoes. The ancient instrument seemed to suck in its breath. There was a hiss and a whisper in the silence before it commenced to clamor.
Wait! wailed Pearl, edging onto the stool beside him. Wait, John! Let me! Let me!
But her feet would not reach as always and so she sat and listened and watched in stunned amazement; dumbfounded before the glorious chiming racket it made and the little black and white keys jumping up and down with never a mortal finger to touch them. John thought somberly: That’s Carolina in the Morning. That was one of Dad’s favorites.
And he could remember the times when they had all listened to it when Ben was there, when they were together, and he knew where the tear was in the roll and the keys would speak out in a short chord of confusion and then go rollicking off again into the mad, happy tune. Pearl hugged the old doll close and sucked her finger in dumb amaze. And when the tune was done she sighed.
