Hawkes Harbors
by S.E. Hinton
Tor Books

“When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.” – THE OUTSIDERS, by S.E. Hinton

In an introduction to his latest Borderlands collection, Tom Monteleone laments the abundance of absinthe soaked cockroach submissions. There were two anthologies created that year, dealing with absinthe and bloodsucking cockroaches; and apparently everyone who wasn’t accepted for these anthologies took it in their minds to submit the rejected stories to Borderlands.

There’s a point here, and I’ll get to it directly. Until then, kindly meditate upon the sound of absinthe soaked cockroaches, scuttling and twittering greenly through your walls.

I was surprised to see HAWKES HARBOR at the bookstore. Surprised to see S.E. Hinton, beloved author of THE OUTSIDERS, RUMBLEFISH, TEX, (and if you don’t know any of these books, go back and finish high school), was releasing her first book in fifteen years. My immediate reaction was to wonder how much movie royalties and residuals could be spent in fifteen years. So call me a cynic. I decided to wait for the paperback, before giving it a look-see. Then I received a review copy. I called it an omen, and started to read.

Have you ever made cupboard soup? You take the cans of whatever you have in the cupboard, dump it into a big old pot, add water and simmer. If you’ve got greens throw them in. If you’ve got veggies, throw them in. Pasta, potatoes, why not?

HAWKES HARBOR is cupboard soup. A whole lot of discordant elements, tossed into a plotline.

A young orphan boy, named Jamie Sommers, (and why do I keep hearing Lee Majors gravellishly baritoning a love song on The Six Million Dollar Man?), who falls in with a rogue named Kell, for a bit of South Sea gunrunning. Shake in some pirates and a shark attack, a fortune in gems and you’ve got the makings of an old-fashioned bildungsroman, (a big fancy term for coming-of-age novel). Rousing and fun, it kind of reminded me of Robert E. Howard’s Sailor Steve Costigan stories.

Jamie returns to the States, older and tougher and a little bit smarter. And that’s where S.E. Hinton introduces the vampire, swooping into the plotline with all of the suddeness of a brick laden coffin falling from a clear blue sky.

Now mind you, HAWKES HARBOR is not a horror novel. S.E. Hinton shouldn’t ought to be trying to write vampire fiction. She doesn’t seem to know that much about the mythology, and doesn’t bring that much new to the genre.

So why’d she do it?

Here’s the twist. HAWKES HARBOR was originally written as the third entry in Harper Collins DARK SHADOWS series; only Harper Collins rejected the novel due to inappropriate subject matter and explicit sexual content. Having been rejected by Harper Collins, and not seeing any absinthe guzzling cockroach anthologies in sight, S.E. Hinton changed the names in the manuscript and peddled it to Tor Books

All of this repackaging strikes me as a perfectly good reason to pitch the book into the nearest recycling bin, yet something happened along the way from the time I opened the book to the time I read the final chapter. I liked Jamie Sommers, even when he was busy playing Renfield, (or Willy Loomis), to Hinton’s vampire, stammering and whining like a Porky Pig St. Vitus dance.

Excuse me, but I have to blaspheme. Forget about horror. HAWKES HARBOR is an illustration of the many ways the many bastards and bozos we meet in life can shape and mold our future. As Jamie puts it – “People help in different ways.”

HAWKES HARBOR is a novel about getting past your past. Outliving the gossip and screwups that trail out behind all of us like a vast skidmark of shame. Once you get past the cupboard soup, once you’ve gotten over the absinthe soaked cockroaches, HAWKES HARBOR is a pretty good read. It’s sweet and redemptive, and the shmaltzy ending worked for me.

Technically, Hinton needs an editor. Or a diet of cheeseburgers and Mars Bars to fatten her sparse plotline. There are continuity gaps. It would have been nice to find out a bit more about the where and how of the vampire. And her constant use of ellipses to represent a trailing thought is…baffling.

I hope that HAWKES HARBOR isn’t where SE Hinton’s career finally runs aground. She’s written fine work in the past, and there’s good writing sprinkled through this book. At the very least I hope the release of HAWKES HARBOR heralds a renewed interest in Hinton’s writing.

Still, I’ll have to end this review feeling that my initial impresssion was a valid one.

Review copy or not, I should have waited for the paperback.

STEVE VERNON, born and raised in the Northern Ontario Shieldland, raised by a pack of wandering beatnik timberwolves, is currently huddled on the icy shores of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Steve's fiction has been published in THE HORROR SHOW, CEMETERY DANCE, HORROR GARAGE, KARL EDWARD WAGNER'S YEAR'S BEST HORROR, HORROR GARAGE, INHUMAN, ABYSS & APEX and many other markets and magazines. Try out Steve's novella of weird western horror, LONG HORN, BIG SHAGGY, (a tale of back-from-the-dead mountainmen, carrion stallions, and zombified buffalo), available from Amazon, Black Death Books or Shocklines. For more info on Steve check his website: http://users.eastlink.ca/~stevevernon