The Auctioneer

By Joan Samson

One of the finest and best-selling horror novels of the 1970s returns at last to chill a new generation of readers

In the isolated farming community of Harlowe, New Hampshire, where life has changed little over the past several decades, John Moore and his wife Mim work the land that has been in his family for generations. But from the moment the charismatic Perly Dinsmore arrives in town and starts soliciting donations for his auctions, things begin slowly and insidiously to change in Harlowe. As the auctioneer carries out his terrible, inscrutable plan, the Moores and their neighbors will find themselves gradually but inexorably stripped of their freedom, their possessions, and perhaps even their lives ...

A chilling masterpiece of terror whose sense of creeping menace and dread increases page by page, Joan Samson’s The Auctioneer (1975) is a rediscovered classic of 20th-century fiction. With echoes of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and Stephen King’s Needful Things , Samson’s novel returns to print at last in this long-awaited new edition, which features an introduction by Grady Hendrix ( Horrorstör , Paperbacks from Hell ) and an afterword by the author’s husband.

“A frightening novel . . . a powerful book from a powerful writer.”–The Grand Rapids Press

“A novel you may never forget . . . a tight classic.”– San Diego Tribune

“Brilliant, compelling . . . Add a powerful twist at the end and you have a total novel that takes hold of the reader on Page One and never lets go until the finish. This just could prove to be one of the top thrillers of the year.”– Dayton News

• Language: English
• Publisher: Valancourt Books
• Release date: Nov 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781948405089

Book preview

JOAN SAMSON

THE AUCTIONEER

with a new introduction by

GRADY HENDRIX

VALANCOURT BOOKS

Dedication: To my father and mother

The Auctioneer by Joan Samson

First published by Simon & Schuster in 1976

First Valancourt Books edition 2018

Copyright © 1975 by Joan Samson

Introduction copyright © 2018 by Grady Hendrix

Afterword © 2018 by Warren Carberg

Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

http://www.valancourtbooks.com

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

All Valancourt Books publications are printed on acid free paper that meets all ANSI standards for archival quality paper.

Cover design by Henry Petrides

INTRODUCTION

What you’re holding is a miracle. Every year, thousands of books go out of print, every decade, a pile of bestsellers slips into obscurity. Between them, Leon Uris, James Michener, and Arthur Hailey wrote fifteen books in the Seventies, eight of them massive bestsellers. Today, they’re mostly relegated to used bookstores and dimly lit library shelves. And yet here I am, looking at a newly reissued copy of Joan Samson’s only novel, The Auctioneer.

On January 15, 1976, Simon and Schuster released a hardback edition of The Auctioneer with a cover painted by noted American artist and illustrator Wendell Minor. It was a big acquisition for Simon and Schuster, and they supported its release with a national print advertising campaign comparing it to Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and bearing blurbs from writers like Brian Death Wish Garfield (I’ve never been face to face with a cobra, but I imagine the effect would be similar.) and publications like The New York Times (We are caught in the perfect claustrophobic terror of Joan Samson’s fictional spell . . .).

Sales were brisk, reviews were good, and the movie rights sold fast, as did the British rights. The Auctioneer came out in paperback in 1977, and in 1978, Coronet, a subsidiary of its British publisher Hodder & Stoughton, released another paperback, this time with a photo-collage cover and a blurb proclaiming, The sensational million copy American bestseller that chilled a nation—soon to be a major film.

But the movie never happened, and after a reissued Avon paperback in 1981, that was the last the world heard from The Auctioneer until 2010 when Centipede Press released a limited edition hardcover, followed by a trade paperback, both of which quickly went out of print. Between that Avon paperback and its reissue by Centipede almost thirty years passed, which is a long time for a book to die, but it turns out that The Auctioneer wasn’t dead, it was becoming an underground classic, passed from reader to reader, picked up at paperback swap shops and library book sales, posted about on discussion forums and blogs. And the question is, why? Why did The Auctioneer refuse to disappear? What made this book different from so many other Seventies bestsellers?

Set in Harlowe, New Hampshire The Auctioneer unfolds in a hardscrabble Yankee farming community where change comes slow, but it’s coming. More and more city people are driving up to see the foliage on weekends and there’ve already been a few robberies a couple of towns over. There’s a vague anxiety about hippies and a recent unsolved murder is surely somehow their fault. But the restlessness the residents of Harlowe feel nibbling around the edges of their lives doesn’t come from without, it comes from within. Collectively, we’ve hallucinated an idyllic America of local farmers and small towns that never change, but the story of America is all about change.

On Harlowe’s farms, indoor plumbing and telephone lines are still a novelty, but John Moore and his wife, Mim, working a farm that’s been in their family for generations, know their real estate is far more valuable than any crop they could possibly produce. Even before Perly Dunsmore shows up and starts his auctions, the old ways are dying. It doesn’t take an auctioneer for Ma to complain about how her son and his wife don’t hatch chickens anymore, but buy them alive because it’s easier. Change comes fast, or change comes slow, but one thing’s for certain: it comes.

Americans have always been restless people, migrating and relocating while yearning for roots. Joan Samson’s life wasn’t any different. Her mother, Helen, was born in a log cabin in Saskatchewan and wound up marrying Ted Samson, a nuclear physicist working for the government. They lived in Watertown, Massachussetts until Joan went to Wellesley. She left before finishing her degree to marry her first husband and followed him to Chicago, where she graduated from the University of Chicago.

After their marriage ended she went back home, where she met Warren Carberg, and the two of them married and moved to Europe, where they lived for a couple of years before returning to the States and settling in Beacon Hill. Deeply involved in the anti-war movement, Carberg and Samson marched in massive demonstrations against the Vietnam War, they went to sit-ins and teach-ins, caught up in the turmoil of the time, but yearning for roots. Eventually they found a country house in rural New Hampshire and moved in part-time. They weren’t alone.

As Vietnam dragged on, disillusioned young people turned their backs on the cities and, in a gesture going all the way back to Thoreau, trekked out into the wild, looking for a more honest and decent way of life. Kate Daloz, author of the history of the back-to-the-land movement, We Are as Gods, wrote:

Graduate students who had never before held a hammer overhauled tobacco barns and flipped through the Whole Earth Catalog by the light of kerosene lamps. Vietnam vets hand-mixed adobe bricks. Born-and-bred Brooklynites felled cedar in Oregon. Former debutants milked goats in Humboldt County and weeded strawberry beds with their babies strapped to their backs.

In the end, almost one million Americans in the late Sixties and early Seventies moved to the countryside. Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, was one. Bernie Sanders was another. And so were Samson and Carberg. The Seventies were the first decade since the colonists arrived when the rural population grew faster than the urban population.

Horror novelists were eager to warn readers that their vision of peaceful country living was an illusion. Thomas Tryon wrote his bestselling Harvest Home, about city slickers moving to the rural paradise of Cornwall Coombe only to discover that the countryside needed blood, in 1973, the same year that Robin Hardy’s British folk horror film, The Wicker Man, taught pretty much the same lesson, as did The Texas Chainsaw Massacre­ released one year later. But America’s wave of rural horror mostly came in The Auctioneer’s wake. Stephen King’s Children of the Corn appeared in 1977, while Manly Wade Wellman’s Appalachian horror novel, The Old Gods Waken, came out in 1979, ushering in a stream of rural horror novels: Maynard’s House (1980), The Abyss (1981), Bloodroot (1982).

Samson’s novel has survived where so many others have been forgotten because it captures the lightning of the Sixties and Seventies in a bottle. In The Auctioneer, the town turns against itself, deputies betray the citizens they’re supposed to protect, parents auction off their children, and everyone rushes to the edge of a cliff and leaps to their destruction as if they’d been waiting for the chance since the day they were born. Samson and Carberg spent the Sixties and Seventies watching families turn against their children, watching deputies betray the citizens they’re supposed to protect, watching America leap to its destruction as if it had been waiting for the chance to destroy itself since the day it was founded.

They sought peace in the country, but even there, Samson saw people seduced by the what-if game: If I bought this property, and fixed it up, and sold it for three times its value, I could be rich. She saw how easy it was to get lost in dreams of wealth and starting over. She saw, in herself and the people around her, Perly Dunsmore.

The Auctioneer started as a ten-page short story Samson showed her husband. He was the writer in the family, and he encouraged her to keep going. She had already earned an agent, Pat Myrer, at McIntosh and Otis, the first literary agency founded by women, with her award-winning manuscript for a non-fiction book about raising their daughter, Watching the New Baby. When Samson finished her first draft of The Auctioneer she sent it to Myrer, who stayed up all night turning pages, then got back in touch. This is it, she said. You’re a writer. Come to New York. You’re going places.

The heat and flash of that sale changed their lives, and then Samson’s brain cancer changed their lives again. Within five months of publication, Samson was gone and the massive wave of promotional events her publisher had planned fell apart. After that there was just a book, floating from library booksale, to beachhouse bookshelf, to used bookstore, to student bedroom. A book that against all odds survived for thirty years with no support from anyone except its readers. A book that survived because it told an essential truth about America.

Perly Dunsmore is the dark side of the salesman, the All-­American Horatio Alger who never made it, the Huck Finn who grew up and curdled into something darker. He can never slow down in case his past catches up with him. He’s always on the hustle and no matter what he’s done he knows he’ll be redeemed by the success that’s waiting for him just over the next horizon, just in that next town. He’s a hero of his own story, no matter how many ex-wives, dead bodies, or broken promises lay strewn in his wake. This time he’ll get it right. And if not this time, then next time, because America is the land of eternal do-overs. All we have to do is lift stakes and head to the next town where nobody knows our names.

But The Auctioneer illustrates the flaw in that plan. Starting over doesn’t change who we are, it just gives us another chance to tell a new story about ourselves. But to tell that story we have to convince ourselves it’s true. As we rush from city to country and back again, as we move from town to town, as we tell that story again, and again, and again, replacing our real histories with convenient fictions, Joan Samson pointed out the problem. When your life turns into a lie, the first person you need to deceive is yourself. After that, the rest unravels easy.

Grady Hendrix

April 2018

Grady Hendrix is a novelist and screenwriter whose books include Horrorstör, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, and the upcoming heavy metal horror novel, We Sold Our Souls. His history of the paperback horror boom of the Seventies and Eighties, Paperbacks from Hell, won the Stoker Award.

1

The fire rose in a perfect cone as if suspended by the wisp of smoke that ascended in a straight line to the high spring sky. Mim and John dragged whole dry saplings from the brush pile by the stone wall and heaved them into the flames, stepping back quickly as the dead leaves caught with a hiss.

Four-year-old Hildie heard the truck coming even before the old sheep dog did. She scampered to the edge of the road and waited impatiently. It was Gore’s truck, moving fast, rutting deeply in the mud and throwing up a spray on either side. John and Mim converged behind Hildie, each taking stock of what might be wrong to bring the police chief out to the last farm on the road.

Bob Gore swung himself out and hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans. He shifted from foot to foot for a moment as if his great belly were seeking a point of equilibrium. Gore had a taste for two things—trouble and gossip. By either route, he could talk away an afternoon without half trying. John glanced over his shoulder at the fire.

Good day for burnin’, Gore said.

Plenty of snow in the woods still, case it’s that brings you round, John said, knowing full well it wasn’t. Figure to get my burnin’ done before I have to mess with permits.

Hell no, Gore said. When was I ever one to go lookin’ for trouble? He grinned at the Moores.

They stood before him soberly. The father, his frame rounded like a stone by thirty years of routine, looked up at the policeman with a steady, slightly skeptical gaze, while the mother, whom the years of marriage and outdoor work had left straighter than ever, stared with blue eyes as clear and curious as those of the child leaning against her legs.

Gore cupped his hands around a match. Thing is, he said, inhaling on a cigarette, we’re havin’ an auction. A policeman’s benefit.

John dug his hands deep into the front pockets of his overalls and hunched his shoulders. But you’re our only cop, Bobby, he said. You already got yourself a swanky cruiser, and you don’t fancy your uniform. What do you need an auction for?

Deputies, Gore said.

Deputies! repeated John.

Gore shrugged. People ain’t satisfied the way they used to be. What with the break-in up to the ledge, and then Rouse’s woods on fire, and the holdup at Linden’s . . . Gore looked across at the splintered reflection of the fire in the pond. Course it’s the murder on the Fawkes place last spring that done it.

Hildie, impatient, began to dance to and fro, pulling on Mim’s arm until Mim began to sway to the child’s rhythm.

Only murder Harlowe’s had in a hundred years, John said. And that by an outsider for sure. So’s that other stuff, most like.

Still, times are changin’, Gore said. Murder right smack in the center of town? Such a fine old home too. There was people after me all along to stop Amelia rentin’ rooms. Then, when she went and got herself strangled . . .

No way to stop her, soothed Mim. Not when old Adeline Fayette’s been takin’ in tourists these twenty years.

Guess if young Nick Fawkes couldn’t steady Amelia down, weren’t much point to other folks gettin’ their ears boxed, John said.

Maybe she needed the money, Mim said, running a hand thoughtfully through her short curls. Left like that with the two kids . . .

Who’s to say? Gore said. He shifted his weight. The troopers don’t lift a finger. ‘Lots of unsolved crimes,’ they tell you. But everyone watches too much television. They get to expectin’ me to scurry round scarin’ up clues. Every poor slob with a job to do’s supposed to be some hotshot detective. Well, I got news—

If everybody in town was a deputy, there’d still be trouble, John said. He eyed his tidy white farmhouse. And we got our fair share of peace in Harlowe too.

Not like we used to, Gore said. It’s gettin’ worse. And not just here. You know that Perly Dunsmore that finally bought the Fawkes place? Well, he’s an auctioneer. Been to half the cities in the world. And he says it’s gettin’ worse all over. Every place growin’ and fillin’ up with strangers. Look at Powlton. Doubled in five years.

What? John said. From four hundred to eight hundred? That’s just on account of that trailer park.

Come on, Johnny, Gore said. Can’t hurt to have a deputy or two. He grinned. At least it’d be somebody to share the blame. And if we raise the money at auction, it’ll be no skin off your teeth. We won’t even touch the town budget.

John examined Gore. Ain’t like you to be dreamin’ up changes, Bobby, he said. Now that new fellow—

A policeman’s benefit’s a smart idea. That’s the main thing, Gore said, pausing to pitch his cigarette toward the fire. And I recall you gave the firemen an old plow last year.

John chuckled. Worth about three and a half cents, he said. Some Sunday farmer paid twelve bucks for it. Must be plannin’ to go west in a covered wagon.

That’s the kind of thing, Gore said, spitting a speck of tobacco to one side.

How about the old wheels? Mim asked.

John nodded. Must be five or six of them.

Someone can make chandeliers out of them, Mim informed Gore, her face merry. Or paint them blue and plant them at the bottom of their driveway for the snowplow to knock over.

Gore leaned back on his heels, his jowly face reverting to its usual slackness. Swell, he said.

The wheels were in the woodshed. John and Gore took two apiece and carried them to the truck. Mim ran past them laughing, chasing the last wheel which was rolling down the front lawn like a hoop. Gore opened up the tailgate of his truck and lifted the wheels in, one after another. Thanks, he said, giving the top wheel an affectionate pat. I’ll lay odds these’ll bring ten bucks once this new auctioneer gets goin’.

Mim and Hildie stared past Gore at a carton full of chipped dishes, a badly cracked pine worktable, and an oversized easy chair leaking stuffing from one arm.

Why’s he takin’ away our wheels? Hildie asked as he drove away.

Auctioneer’s goin’ to sell them, John said.

Why? Hildie asked.

John knit his brows and shrugged.

For money, love, Mim said. But it’s nothin’ to do with the likes of us. Nothin’ at all.

It was mud season. In the woods there was still a fair snow cover, though it was receding in dark circles from the trees as the trunks warmed in the lengthening days. But Moore’s pasture, which turned a steep face to the southeast, was already bare except for sparkling heaps here and there where drifts had been, and the meadow at the bottom where snow lingered near the stream. The soggy ground, matted with the roots of last year’s hay, gave like a sponge underfoot. The sun drew the moisture from woods and field and stream and pond, and set it loose in the air. But the sky remained deep and dry and blue. It was the time of year when mittens and caps and indoor heat seem stale. A thousand outdoor chores crop up and country people feel groundswells of new strength.

On Thursday afternoon, when Gore came again, John and Mim were halfway up the pasture where it leveled out a bit, deciding where to put the patch of Hubbard squash they planned on for a cash crop that year, where to set the corn, where to plant the shell beans and potatoes. Hildie squatted at the edge of last year’s potato patch, pushing her hands into the icy mud and watching the impressions fill with water. Only Ma, too stiff with arthritis for the out-of-doors, could bear to remain in the dry front room by the wood stove watching television. She hardly quickened to the weather any more, except to comment on what she saw through the front window. Besides, she would no more miss her programs than let pass the rare scraps of gossip that came her way.

When Gore got out of his truck, the Moores waved and started down the hill, Hildie and Lassie trotting ahead.

What’s he after now? John muttered.

Got to tell you how his blessed auction went. Mim laughed. He should of been the town crier instead of the town cop.

Ma had heard the truck too and was rapping on the window, beckoning furiously, her image faded to gray by the weathered plastic tacked over the glass for insulation.

Inside, the house was faintly pungent with woodsmoke. Over the years the stoves had deposited a crust of dull black on the ceilings and sifted soot into the crevices between the scrubbed floorboards. It was a house that had been lived in for generations by the same family, and treasures from various eras cluttered every surface. Even on top of the television set, a kerosene lamp with a fluted base and a tall etched chimney jostled wax flowers under a dusty dome, three Hummel figurines, and a plastic replica of the Statue of Liberty. There was a light rhythm of clocks ticking against each other—the cuckoo clock, the eight-day clock with columbine painted on the glass, and the grandfather clock in the hall. The various chimes and the chirp of the cuckoo were no longer synchronized, and the house was filled with random sounds the Moores barely heard, a counterpoint to the birdsong that filtered in from outside.

In the front room, Ma sat bolt upright in the precise center of a bright slipcovered couch. She seemed to have shrunk since her clothes were put on. The collar of her flannel bathrobe stood out like a monk’s cowl around her drawn neck, and her fuzzy pink bedroom slippers seemed four sizes larger than the feet that held them so carefully side by side on the bleached floor. She seemed more like a child than a grandmother.

Gore stood, enormous and grinning, in the center of the room, dwarfing his surroundings. Ma held out her hands to him with the force of a command until he took his own hands out of his pockets and leaned over to grasp hers. How are you, Mrs. Moore? he asked.

Not so good, sighed Ma. I ain’t got the go I used to. Her weary voice contrasted with her small hazel eyes—sharp as a bobcat’s—watching Bob Gore from under her tangle of gray hair.

Hildie sprang onto the couch and curled up against Ma. Without taking her eyes off Gore, Ma reached out a knobby hand and, with a few pats, straightened Hildie around until she quieted down and folded her hands in her lap.

Mim perched on the edge of a straight chair near the door and John took the piano bench.

And you, Bobby, Ma was saying. What’s new? Anything you can hope to tell us in less than a day or two?

Perly Dunsmore’s what’s new, Mrs. Moore, Gore said, settling his broad self comfortably in the rocking chair. He’s the newest thing Harlowe’s seen in years. He beamed, as if the auctioneer were a glistening new possession, a special find, a bargain worthy of the envy of any neighbor who knew value when he saw it.

Who? Ma said, raising her brows. You mean that crazy fool moved into the Fawkes place all by hisself?

Gore lit a cigarette, located a flowerpot by his left elbow to flick the ashes into, and seemed to expand just slightly. He took a breath.

Don’t wear us plumb out now, Bobby, Ma said, but her voice was no longer weary.

Good turnout? John asked.

Wonderful, Gore said, taking a deep breath. It was one absolutely wonderful auction. He chuckled. You wouldn’t believe how that Perly Dunsmore gets the most for everything. What an auctioneer! I never saw nothin’ to beat it. He gets up there on that bandstand and I don’t know him, hardly. He’s like one of them fish can puff itself up to four times its ordinary size. Sharp as a whip, he is. And what a talker! Makes me seem like the silent type.

They talk different, John said, these city dudes. They drink crankcase oil for breakfast.

Oh, but Perly’s a New Hampshire boy, Gore said. From Elvira, up to the Canadian border. Ain’t much we can tell him about the country.

Thought he was some big-deal consultant, John said. That’s what Arthur Stinson says. And he ought to know after all the time he spent paintin’ and scrapin’ that place.

Well, Perly ain’t ordinary, Gore said. Fact, there’s a man could do any damn thing he set his mind to. But he growed up on a New Hampshire farm like all the rest of us. It’s just that he lit out when he weren’t much more than a chicken. Made his way everywhere you can think of. Mexico, Alaska, Vegas, Venezuela. All over. And all over America too. Once in a while he’d run an auction, I guess, but most of the time he was some kind of consultant that tells people how to manage their land. He just kept wanderin’. Must of thought he’d find somethin’ better.

Ma snorted.

Seems like he didn’t, ma’am, Gore said. Because here he is, ready to settle right back where he started from. Fact, that’s how he knew about the Fawkes place. He stayed there once about a year back, when Amelia was rentin’ out rooms. And he was smart enough to see Harlowe’s as good a place as any.

They say the Fawkes place was quite a bargain, John said.

Still, he’s a bit on the odd side, you ask me, Mim said. Movin’ into that big house all alone with just that dog. Specially after all this time no one’d even cut the grass.

Guess murders in the night don’t mean nothin’ to him, Ma said.

Reviews for The Auctioneer

[jen6e6moore · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm not entirely sure what all that was about. It was a story, I enjoyed it well enough, but there wasn't a whole lot of *there* there.

[runner56_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A good old fashioned horror story from the 70's with none off the gratuitous sex and violence offered in so many publications today and sometimes that is no bad thing in fact at times quite refreshing. Set in a small New Hampshire town of Harlowe the story revolves around a hard working farmer John Moore, his wife Miriam (Mim) and their four year old daughter Hildie. This is a close-knit community where families and friends share their lives, loves,problems and successes. Into this environment steps Perly Dunsmore "The Auctioneer" who spends his time convincing the locals to donate products/items to the local weekly auction all proceeds of which will benefit the community. However as befits all good horror tales nothing is ever quite that simple and it soon becomes clear that Dunsmore has a hidden agenda, and by means of mafia type intimidation hopes to acquire power and riches beyond his wildest dreams.The locals find themselves in a downward spiral as everything they worked for and paid with sweat and toil is taken by this evil impostor. It is quite easy to draw parallels between dictators such as Hitler or Stalin and in some ways to understand how the charisma and persuasive powers of such individuals can impact on the lives of simple country folks going about their daily tasks in an open and honest fashion. As we head towards an exciting conclusion it is clear that Perly Dunsmore hopes to strip every Harlowe resident of their worldly possessions....unless of course the good people can eradicate this evil before it is too late....

[sturlington_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a story about an idyllic but poor small town that is invaded by a self-serving, demoniac auctioneer who starts taking everything from the townspeople. It starts slow but gradually builds in intensity as the family at the center of the story, the Moores, become more and more desperate. Really, this is about tensions between rural and urban America, between the old ways and the new ways, and the invasion of the countryside by entitled outsiders who only want to destroy what is idyllic about it. I think it reflects the fears of the time it was written, and in a different way, the fears of today as well.

[sean191 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Part horror, part social commentary (that may be redundant) the story covers a lot of ground in a fairly brief book. It offers a look at people's ties to the land, greed, corruption, pride and a lot more. The story is set in a small rural town, where generations of families have grown up as neighbors and have shared each other's history. But things begin to unravel when a stranger rolls into town and begins to hold auctions. First, the auctions are purportedly meant to raise money to increase a police force of one (that doesn't need increasing). Then the police force continues to increase as does the auctioneer's influence over the town. Without giving too much away, I found myself drawing parallels between this book and the rise of the Third Reich - scary stuff indeed.