Robert Jackson Bennett was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and grew up in Katy, Texas. He is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. Like many of us who have spent time there, he fell in love with Austin and he has been fortunate enough to make his home there.
His debut novel, Mr. Shivers, opens with a freight train crossing from Tennessee into Missouri. Clinging to the side of a cattle car in that train are two hobos, Connelly (referred to throughout the book by his last name only) and an unnamed "old man". They drop off the train into the first of many scenes of the poverty and misery of the Great Depression. Connelly, the reader learns, is a man on a mission. Two weeks out of his home in Memphis, he is pursuing an as yet unidentified man for an unstated reason.
As the story develops, we learn that Connelly's young daughter has been killed by a mysterious man whose face is marred by three long scars. Unable to move on with his life, Connelly’s marriage deteriorates, and he decides to leave to find and exact revenge on the man who murdered his daughter. Connelly is following the murderer's bloody trail across a devastated America, living only for revenge.
At this early stage in his quest, Connelly has already learned that the man he seeks is a legend among the displaced populations of the Depression era. He is known by a variety of names, such as "the Harvester", "the sickle man", "the Grinning Bone Dancer", or “the Shiver Man”. Hobo legend depicts "Mr. Shivers" as an elemental force, older than time.
One aged hobo tells Connelly the legend, "that when bums and all the runaway boys and girls die they get their last chance to ride freight with Mr. Shivers, that he has a train made of night that rides straight to hell and the furnace don't run on coal or wood, the furnace runs on you. Mr. Shivers comes back and takes a foot or a hand or an eye or an ear and feeds it to his train, spurring it on, sending it down to the depths of the earth and to eternity as it eats you alive."
If this were simply a mystery novel, then the story would ask who Mr. Shivers is and why he is killing all those people. But this novel quickly transitions from Steinbeck territory, through Hammettesque hardboiled revenge story, into something more akin to a tale by Stoker. The question is not just who but, perhaps, what Mr. Shivers is.
The broken-hearted Connelly knows that whatever else he may be, Mr. Shivers is also human -- and Connelly means to kill him. No matter what the cost. And as he continues his pursuit, Connelly is surprised and pleased to learn that the Shiver Man fears him.
As he travels from Tennessee to Oklahoma, experiencing some of the worst of "Dust Bowl" America, Connelly crosses paths with an assortment of characters. He meets good folk, brought low by the depression, struggling to stay alive but still willing to share with fellow sufferers. He meets three old crones who might have immigrated from Macbeth's Scotland. He meets an villainous sheriff who may have struck a bargain for eternal life with the Shiver Man.
Most importantly he meets others who are after Mr. Shivers, seeking revenge for their lost loved ones. They include a former preacher called Pike -- "still a man of God, in my own way, but with no flock". Another is Jakob Hammond (like most referred to only by his last name in the rest of the book) who is the first Jew Connelly ever met and a younger man than most of his fellow questers. Roosevelt (no relation to the President) appears to be a man who once held a higher state in life, wearing the tattered remains of once stylish clothes and a worn out bowler hat. As their quest continues they are joined by others such as Lottie, who silently mourns her dead child, and Peachy, a Black man who is the one quester who has not lost a loved one to Mr. Shivers but joins out of gratitude to Connelly.
Despite his resolve, Connelly is periodically tempted to turn aside from his quest. He is tempted by the possibility of love or of a home. He is confronted with a very real threat of madness and death. But when he looks at the worn picture of his daughter that he carries in his wallet his resolve is renewed and he presses on following the murderer's bloody trail and living only for revenge.
As he and his companions continue on their quest Connelly learns that the quest for vengeance rots a mans soul. One by one, his compatriots are lost and in the end it is he alone who confronts Mr. Shivers. But his triumph does not bring him the return to wholeness and normalcy that he sought. Revenge, he learns, always exacts a terrible price and in this case it comes at an unimaginable cost.
The Great Depression and the hordes of hobos and "Okies" is a great backdrop for a horror story. And Mr. Shivers is a terrific menace -- ranking up there with the great dark creations of horror such as Michael Myers or Freddie Krueger. Robert James Bennett makes excellent use of these elements to build a striking horror novel that paints a memorably grim vision of the how and why of the way our modern world is the way it is.
He also shows real talent at the sort of descriptive prose that marks a novel as literary. In many ways, his writing seems to combine Hemmingwayesque spare and realistic dialog with descriptive passages reminiscent of Steinbeck's depression era classic, The Grapes of Wrath -- not that his word pictures equal something like Steinbeck's famous description of the turtle but it is very good.
The novel is not without its flaws. One serious weakness is character development. Connelly, as a protagonist, is boldly yet simply drawn -- a very tall, muscular, intimidating, bearded man of few words. When we meet him he is emotionally a hollow man -- virtually a husk -- following the death of his daughter. This makes for an effective characterization, but it leaves little room for development and Connelly never manifests any real semblance of a personality and only changes as the novel reaches its climax. Some of the secondary characters change more along the way but these are more abrupt shifts than character development.
Horror fans will recognize that this novel is quite derivative of a number of well known sources and may thus see where it is going long before the author springs his climax. One cannot help but recognize elements in common with Cormac McCarthy's The Road or other apocalyptic themed novels -- the Great Depression certainly looked very much like the Apocalypse at the time and convinced many religious leaders of the day that they were in the "end days". You may also recognize aspects of Stephen King's Dark Tower series in this novel. And there are certainly unmistakable similarities to Clive Barker's short story "The Midnight Meat Train". But all these, and other, familiar tropes are remixed in an effective manner, enhanced by the realistically bleak setting of the 1930's dust bowl.