Rogers Daily News Wednesday, August 14, 1974 Genres, by E. Alan Long
I may become addicted to Ruby Jean Jensen.
According to the book, a “Gothic” novel is a form of novel in which magic, mystery, and chivalry are the chief characteristics. Although she doesn’t claim to adhere to every rule, Mrs. Jensen does exhibit most of these qualities in her most recently released book, “Seventh All Hallows’ Eve”.
One thing common with all of Mrs. Jensen’s books that I’ve read so far is that she can take the “old” stories and styles and adapt them to modern characters and moral problems and still have what is basically a Gothic novel.
“Seventh All Hallows’ Eve”, if you couldn’t tell from the title, center around witchcraft. It is difficult to determine who the central character is – Aleah Chalmers; her illegitimate daughter Jodie; or Luther Christian, a witchcraft researcher.
The story opens with Aleah, a cocktail waitress at a local club, receiving a marriage proposal from Luther Christian, a member of the club. Both Christian and Aleah are in their mid-twenties with rather dark pasts behind them. Aleah, of course, has born the brunt of ridicule heaped upon her because of her illegitimate child, conceived when Aleah was fourteen. Several years before Luther was found innocent of killing a girl found in his car one morning following one of his several drunken sprees. Shortly after the trail, Christian was paralyzed from the waist down as a result of an automobile accident he had while he was drunk.
The marriage proposal is on a business basis with Aleah being able to gain a divorce after 30 days of marriage, falling right after Halloween. After they are married, and Aleah, Jodie, and Grandma Chalmers move into Christian and his brother’s mansion, Jodie begins to be haunted by the ghost of a little girl dressed in blue. Aleah, after disregarding this as being the product of a child’s imagination, begins to hear footsteps in the upper part of the mansion, which belongs to her brother-in-law, Garth.
Aleah is fascinated by Garth, but at the same time she is frightened by him. Jodie, who has never had a father before, loves Christian, and seeing Garth as a detriment to her newfound family security, finds herself perturbed with her mother.
One thing I learned a long time ago is to never tell the ending to a horror story and then expect someone to read it. I will say, after discussing the book with my RDN muse, Karen Bogan, that while the plot may be more intricate in “The House that Samael Built”, the story in “Seventh All Hallows’ Eve” is more professionally presented and more firmly structured. It’s a good time for the book to come out and I figure that by 1974’s All Hallows’ Eve the book will be selling like the proverbial hot cakes.
