The Wages Of Belief By Elizabeth Massie: Book Review 03/02/2025

The following contains spoils for Elizabeth Massie’s Sineater, but not the upcoming sequel, The Wages of Belief and Other Stories, out February 18th from Crossroad Press

Elizabeth Massie scooped a Bram Stoker Award for the novel Sineater. Thirty-three years later, she’s releasing its sequel, The Wages of Belief, a novella contained in The Wages of Belief and Other Stories, out February 18th from Crossroads Press. Admittedly, a Stoker-winning first novel is a hard act to follow. But Massie also won a Lifetime Achievement Award, and she shows us why with this stunning follow up that was worth the wait. 

I loved Sineater, in part, for the tension between the Telemanchian and the Southern Gothic. The Telemanchian takes its name from Odysseus’s son, who searches for his father. The trope carries more than a tinge of the bildungsroman and a desire to perhaps take on patriarchal power.

Most famously, James Joyce uses it in Ulysses with the relationship between Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. He also uses it in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But it’s far broader than that: Joseph’s Conrad employs the Telemachian quest in Heart of Darkness as Marlow searches for Kurtz. Jack Kerouac also uses a wistful version as Dean Moriarty whirls across America in search of old Dean Moriarty. The trope’s cycled and recycled throughout the Western canon, and it pops up again in Sineater. 

The Telemanchian in Sineater 

And what is Sineater but Joel Barker’s search for his father, Avery? Cursed as he is, outcast as he is, Joel must find him to “confront his dark heritage.” In doing so, he becomes a man and eventually takes on his father’s power. Joel must look upon his father’s face, then eat crab apples from his chest. He completes his Telemanchian quest and accepts his dreadful patrimony by becoming the sineater himself. 

This Telemachian quest meshes perfectly with the Southern Gothic. If the past is always haunting us, what can we do but confront it? To exorcise his past, Joel reconcile with it—and whether he manages that exorcism becomes the crux of the novel. As the repository of community sin, Avery is a kind of Southern Gothic avatar. To save himself, Joel must see his face. 

Sineater Finds Its Mirror in The Wages of Belief

Thirty-three years is a Biblically long time to wait for a sequel, but this one is worth it. To my utter delight, Massie hands us a beautiful mirror of Sineater in The Wages of Belief—without the drag of a tedious rewrite. When the sineater goes missing, his son Henson Darrow must return to Beacon Cove to complete his own Telemachian quest, grapple with his own past, face those demons and hopefully release their hold. Whether he, like Joel, manages it is the crux of the novel. 

Several other points mirror the original text. Readers will delight in discovering them on their own. While Wages doesn’t need to be read hand-in-hand with Sineater, Massie’s genius will only shine brighter if you do. 

Like Sineater, The Wages of Belief inherits a rich Southern Gothic tradition. There’s still plenty of horror in those mountain hills. Henson must reconcile his bitter patrimony; he must deal with the monstrosities people perpetuate in the name of God. Their clannishness and insularity and isolation only make it worse.

Beacon Cove is a place the world forgot, a place where the sineater’s children can still skip school and no one will come after them. If you don’t live there, you don’t realize that these places still exist in the dark beating heart of the South. That’s the real horror here. While there may not be a sineater, there is a Beacon Cove. Massie knows that, and she nails it. 

I read The Wages of Belief in two sittings. The prose sings. The plot grips you by the throat and doesn’t let go. It’s a dark journey into the heart of mountain country, into the depths of old time religion. If “horror in the church” is an old Southern Gothic trope, Elizabeth Massie counts as one of its masters. In these books, the past is never dead. It returns and resurfaces, always lurking, always ready to snatch our breath when we least expect it. You can reconcile your heritage, but you cannot escape it. You must look your father in the face. 

The Wages of Belief and Other Stories from the Dark Side by Elizabeth Massie 

Henson Darrow, college student, receives a desperate phone call from his brother in the Appalachian community of Beacon Cove, a place Henson had wanted to leave for good. His brother begs Henson to return, for their father is missing. Their father is the community’s sineater, a terrifying position that is feared yet required by the religious people who live there.

Henson seeks the advice of Joel Barker, a man who has escaped the clutches of Beacon Cove. Joel hesitates to advise Henson, however. And so, returning to Beacon Cove, Henson sets out on a journey of trepidation and then terror as he, himself, is charged with the horrible responsibility of cleansing sin from those who die. The Wages of Belief is a standalone sequel to Massie’s Stoker-winning novel, Sineater.

*A woman enamored with a certain soap opera believes she has been cast in a secret episode that is filming in the local grocery store. Not the best idea in the long run when simple mistakes become huge.

*Three young sisters seek the truth of a man’s death in a dark basement filled with a hoard of peculiar items.

*A clumsy murderer finds himself caught up in something worse than legal entanglement.

*Topsy, the Coney Island elephant electrocuted by Thomas Edison to prove the power of direct current, seeks revenge as an angry, though rather hapless, spirit.

*Sink holes begin appearing at a rapid pace, not ordinary sink holes but deep cavernous pits that seem to have minds of their own.

These are just some of the tales of darkness and dread found in The Wages of Belief and Other Stories from the Dark Side, a new collection by Bram Stoker Award-winning Elizabeth Massie.

Praise for Elizabeth Massie

“Elizabeth Massie is personally one of my favorite authors. Her writing is true, heartfelt, and wildly original. She is one of the greats.” – Bentley Little, author of The Association, DMV, The Bank

“Massie’s sharp observations and eye for detail bring her characters to life.” – Publishers Weekly

Elizabeth Massie

Elizabeth Massie, an eighth generation Virginian, has been writing professionally since 1984. Her works have been published by Simon & Schuster, Pocket, Berkely, Tor/Forge, Pearson, Rigby, Crossroad Press, and more, and include novels, short fiction, nonfiction, poetry, articles, media tie-ins, and skits.

Most of her works are in the horror/suspense genre (Sineater, Hell Gate, Desper Hollow, Wire Mesh Mothers, Homeplace, Afraid, It, Watching, Naked on the Edge, and more), but she also writes historical fiction, mainstream fiction (Homegrown), media tie-ins (The Tudors, Versailles, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dark Shadows), educational materials for American history textbooks, and poetry (Night Benedictions). Her first novel, Sineater, and her novella “Stephen” have both won Bram Stoker Awards from the Horror Writers Association. Her Tudors novelization (Season 3) won the Scribe award. Her short fiction can be found in numerous anthologies and several years’ best collections.

She is currently working on Ameri-Scares (Crossroad Press) a 50 novel series of spooky books for middle grade readers (age 8-12), a series which was optioned for television by Warner Horizon and which, as of 2024, has 16 novels so far, with several additional writers joining the fray – Mark Rainey, David Simms, Trish MacComber.

She also continues to work on new horror novels and short stories for adults. Check out her lead story in Freedom of Screech, edited by Craig Spector and her some newer tales “It’s in the Cards” in The Porcupine Boy and Other Anthological Oddities, “Those Who Are Terrified” in Midnight in the Graveyard, and “Scarves,” which is featured in the ACLU-benefiting anthology, Dystopian States of America (March 2020.)

Her newest collection, Madame Cruller’s Couch and Other Bizarre and Dark Tales, was released from Crossroad Press August 2021. Since then, additional new short fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies including “Nom, Nom,” in The Horror Zine’s Book of Monster Stories and “And the Window Was Boarded Shut” in American Cannibal, among others.

In 2023, she was honored with the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award..

A member of Amnesty International for more than 35 years, Massie writes numerous letters on behalf of victims of human rights abuses worldwide. She lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with her husband, talented illustrator and theremin player, Cortney Skinner, and enjoys hiking, geocaching, knitting, traveling roads she’s never been on before, and visiting amusement parks (the older, the better.)

She founded and for nearly four years managed the Hand to Hand Vision project (on Facebook) that raised thousands of dollars to help others during these tough economic times. Though she has a home office, she likes to work at Starbucks a couple days a week. There she can feel like part of the human race. And have a chai.

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