Epeolatry Book Review: Ninety-Eight Sabers by Elizabeth Broadbent
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Title: Ninety-Eight Sabers
Author: Elizabeth Broadbent
Genre: Occult horror, horror
Publisher: Undertaker Books
Date: 29th September, 2024
Synopsis: The Trenholm clan helped found Lower Congaree, South Carolina. Their land is cursed. Their abusive patriarch has croaked. Only heirs who attend the funeral will inherit.
But when Truluck Trenholm suffered his eventually-fatal stroke, oldest son Ash turned the haunted plantation into an enormously successful reality show—with all the attendant ethical issues of profiting off its legacy. Forced to tolerate the intrusion of California producers, grip guys, and cameras, toting a ton of childhood trauma, Ash’s brother and cousins have plenty of animosity for each other, along with a strong aversion to the paranormal shenanigans of their childhood home. But when Truluck’s funeral goes pear-shaped and the cousins are cut out of his will, Hollywood producers offer the deal of a lifetime: they’ll turn the Trenholms into witchy Kardashians with a Southern drawl.
If the cousins walk away, they’ll lose everything. But the farm’s high strangeness keeps getting stranger. Something’s happening on Cypress Bend. And filming might make it worse…
Books call to me according to my mood; sometimes I crave a cosy mystery – the complete opposite of much of my darker reading, sometimes I want the expanse of a post-apocalyptic landscape, other times I want atmosphere, something that will wrap me up in its recognisable blanket and take me away from the present. Ninety-Eight Sabers is one of the latter. I’ve read a few Southern Gothic novels and love the oppressive weight of such a setting: the heat, the foliage, its claustrophobic impact on the characters. As soon as this particular title came up, it appealed to me at just the right time. It certainly has those ingredients.
When you add in a dysfunctional family, supernatural presence(s) and a history mired in the tragedy and horror of slavery, you get a well-paced narrative which explores how those in the present come to terms with the legacy of their ancestors, the ‘sins of the fathers’.
The Trenholms, as descendants of slave-owners and plantation owners, are truly haunted in every sense of the word: in their home, silent ghosts continue their tasks of old but there is never any interaction. Worse still, their lately deceased father had insisted they never speak of the ghosts, so for most of their lives they have denied to themselves and to each other that such things exist. This example of ‘hauntology’ is an excellent metaphor for the family’s historical guilt, and it feels as though the land and its ghosts are waiting for that much-needed public acknowledgement.
But their presence remains disturbing, reinforcing this collective guilt and driving Ashby Trenholm to employ ‘every ragged scrap of blood relative’ as part of his attempt at reparation. He provides homes and employment via Cypress Bend but needs more money to maintain this – hence the admittance of the reality TV crew, which, with the need for ratings and for a ‘sellable product,’ continually push for ghostly interactions. This aspect alone nudges the family along the road to disaster.
At the same time, with the reappearance of three ghosts – known portents of disaster – the family recognises that a time of reckoning is at hand. The siblings and cousins are forced to confront their relationships with each other and with the past. There are fireworks, disappearances and reappearances, lost time and time-slips.
As you are bowled along by the flawed, but engaging, characters and their apparent inability to be honest with themselves and each other, you wonder how the story is going to end. And when the ending does come, it is satisfying and – a strange word to use I suppose – appropriate.
As an exploration of guilt and misguided attempts to ‘do the right thing’, this is an excellent read. Neither mawkish nor patronising, it gets its message across: to own your present, you must own your past – with honesty.
/5
Available from Amazon.
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Stephanie Ellis writes dark speculative prose and poetry and has been published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Her longer work includes the folk horror novels, The Five Turns of the Wheel, Reborn, and The Woodcutter, and the post-apocalyptic/horror/sci-fi The Barricade, and the novellas, Bottled and Paused. Her dark poetry has been published in her collections Lilith Rising (co-authored with Shane Douglas Keene), Foundlings (co-authored with Cindy O’Quinn) and Metallurgy, as well as the HWA Poetry Showcase Volumes VI, VII, VIII, and IX and Black Spot Books Under Her Skin. She can be found supporting indie authors at HorrorTree.com via the weekly Indie Bookshelf Releases. She can be found at https://stephanieellis.org and on Blue Sky as stephellis.bsky.social.
