![]() ![]() Pearl and John are two small children being raised by their mother, Willa, in Cresap's Landing, a sorrowful speck of a town along the Ohio River near Moundsville, W.Va. It is rough-hewn, wildly over the top and fiendishly entertaining, with some crucial social commentary tucked in there as well, like a precious coin smuggled in a raggedy old sock. It pays scant attention to narrative niceties like punctuation. That's a shame, because The Night of the Hunter is a gorgeous gut-punch of a book, a crime novel and ghost story and morality tale all rolled into one, an ugly-beautiful book that makes you leap at shadows and shudder when the sun goes down. So vivid and menacing is the film, which stars Robert Mitchum as the sinister predator with l-o-v-e tattooed on the knuckles of one hand and h-a-t-e on the other, that most people have forgotten all about the novel. James O'Neill could never escape the shadow of the role that made him famous.Ī related kind of "good bad luck" befell Davis Grubb in 1955, when a movie was made of the novel he had published two years earlier, The Night of the Hunter. When the actor James O'Neill played the title character in a stage version of The Count of Monte Cristo, it was a piece of "good bad luck," his son Eugene O'Neill later said. Julia Keller's latest novel is A Killing in the Hills. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Night of the Hunter Author Davis Grubb ![]()
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