The Happy Man

Ah... the eighties.

Skinny-dipping suburbanites... Thai sticks...The Phil Donahue Show.

Charles Ripley, the protagonist of HIgg's novel, shares a king-sized waterbed with his lovely wife Shelly. They are living the good life in a newly developed upscale neighborhood outside San Diego. Charles has a promising career in the aerospace industry, the exciting new sector of the economy that supports most of their friends. When Ruskin and Sybil Marsh move into the house next door, the couple with their teenage son seem like the perfect new additions to the community. They are affluent, attractive, generous with their good liquor and drugs -- liberated to a degree that Charles finds seductive and a bit disorienting.

The Happy Man opens with Charles sitting alone in his living room watching the Marsh's decomposed bodies carried from their home. A mailman had noticed a smell he knew from his time in Viet Nam. The next day, when a man comes to follow-up on the investigation, Charles recognizes that he is neither the law nor the press. Charles kills him, puts him the trunk of his Plymouth Valiant, and drives away.

This is the knockout opening of a book that works better as eighties nostalgia than a horror novel. Of course the Marshes are not what they appear to be. What they are, and as disgusting as that is, turns out to be a bit disappointing, unconvincing and almost mundane. All that self-assured happiness that Ripley feels so drawn to centers around the Marsh's membership in a secret society that takes the Marquis de Sade as their guiding spirit. (Really?) As the plot escalates, Higg's dialog remains clunky and pedantic. Perhaps we have come to expect more over the last thirty years, but the shocker moments could really use some more shock elements. This is maybe the only book I've ever read that I felt needed to be grosser.

But there is also much to be said for Higg's ability to bring the book in at under two hundred pages. And I loved such details as Ripley's effort to calm his nerves by drinking "supermarket vodka" and watching early HBO.