THE WEIGHT OF BLOOD by LAURA MCHUGH + SKETCHES FOR MY SWEETHEART THE DRUNK by JEFF BUCKLEY

BY TIM P. WALKER

Beware the bottled thoughts of angry young men

Secret compartments hide all of the skeletons

Little girl wants to make her home with him

In the middle of the shore, she wonders

“Don’t know what you asked for”

 

So go the opening lines of Jeff Buckley’s “Nightmares by the Sea,” the centerpiece of his posthumous 1997 album, Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk. Though you won’t find a sea in the Ozark Mountains—rivers, streams, and lakes certainly, but no sea—the world Laura McHugh conjures in her debut novel The Weight of Blood (Spiegel & Grau, 2014) can be as cold and deep as any vast body of water, and the undertow just as merciless.

 

The Weight of Blood isn’t about angry young men or their bottled thoughts but rather the women who find themselves ensnared in them. This novel is mostly the story of Lucy Dane, a young woman from Henbane, Missouri, on the cusp of her senior year of high school. When the body of a friend, a neglected and abused girl who had disappeared a year prior, is found stuffed in a tree, Lucy is unwittingly sent on a path of self-discovery, especially when a crucial piece of evidence, a necklace she had given her friend, turns up in a trailer she’s cleaning for her uncle. Teaming up with a boy she once shared a kiss with, the two embark on an intrepid investigation that not only threatens to dredge an evil that has taken root in Henbane’s many cold indifferent shadows but also expose the darkness at the center of Lucy’s own troubled family history, especially in regards to her mother, a woman named Lila who has been missing since Lucy was a baby and whose own heartbreaking story unfolds in a parallel narrative.

Jeff Buckley was on the cusp of something in the spring of 1997. He had just recorded an album’s worth of songs with producer Tom Verlaine that he wound up shelving, unsatisfied with the results. His previous album, the now-canonized Grace, was well-received at the time but underperformed commercially. In a time when the music industrial was rife with turmoil, when major labels were merging and downsizing seemingly every other week, Buckley needed a hit, and the stakes were high for the follow-up. He was all set to re-record much of the material with his band in Memphis when he went for a fateful swim in the Wolf River Harbor, and Buckley got caught in the undertow from the wake of a passing barge. It’s entirely possible that had he not drowned, had he finished the album he envisioned, Buckley may have churned out another masterpiece. A critical one anyway. Considering the state of commercial radio in the wake of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed conglomerates like Infinity Broadcasting to gobble up multiple radios in the same market, it’s very likely the album would’ve drowned in a sea of homogony.

 

The shelved Verlaine sessions make up the first half of the two-disc 1998 compilation Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, and as it is, it’s difficult to see why he was so dissatisfied. What exists is a rousing collection of ominous rockers (“Yard of Blonde Girls,” “Witches Rave,” “Nightmares by the Sea) and achingly beautiful ballads (“Opened Once”). Floating over it all is Buckley’s ethereal tenor, which not only ordains every track with a dreamlike quality, but fills them with a pervasive sense of melancholy. The lone single released from this set, the R&B-tinged slow jam “Everybody Here Wants You,” exemplifies this. Though written as a love song to his girlfriend at the time, the sparseness of the arrangement and weightless nature of his voice seem to distance him from the object of his affection, as if they were a distant face in a crowded room. “I’m only here for this moment,” he sings, and it sounds like a resigned sigh, seemingly acknowledging the fleeting nature of it all. The fact that this missed the charts and disappeared from radio playlists completely only makes it all the more fitting of a theme song for Lucy’s mother Lila.

 

In her narrative in The Weight of Blood, Lila, orphaned young, spends her teen years shuffling between foster homes before taking a dodgy job that lands her in Henbane as a farm hand. But Henbane isn’t a town that’s keen on out-of-towners, and because she’s an attractive woman, an object of men’s desires, the townsfolk suspect her of being a witch, often treating her with disdain and keeping her at arm’s length. It’s a lonely existence, but she isn’t the only character in this novel that bears its burden.

 

Loneliness hangs over Henbane like a dense fog, not only in Lila’s time but in Lucy’s. Lucy, an only child and the spitting image of her mother Lila, spends much of her time alone, as her father has to seek work out of town, keeping him away from home for days, sometimes weeks at a time. She’s occasionally looked over by Birdie, a widowed and childless neighbor who serves as a kind of surrogate mother to Lucy. Then there’s Cheri, the murdered friend, a mentally stunted girl who’s neglected by everyone including her mother. So neglected was she that when she disappeared, she was thought to have run away from home. It’s that kind of loneliness that leaves one vulnerable to the predatory evil that lurks in the pages of this novel and in the bottled thoughts of angry young men.

 

The further you wade into Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, the darker and colder it gets. The second disc of this compilation consists mostly of demos which are by turns sparser (“I Know We Could Be Happy Baby,” “Thousand Fold,” a cover of Genesis’ “Back in N.Y.C.”), eerier (“Murder Suicide Meteor Slave”), and desolate through and through. Simply listening to it can make you feel like the loneliest person on the planet, which is why it pairs so well with The Weight of Blood.

 

Like Lucy Bane, Jeff Buckley was someone with his own troubled family history, who not only inherited his looks but also his haunting tenor from a man he’d never know. His biological father was Tim Buckley, a singer-songwriter who in the late sixties and early seventies cut several albums of jazz-dusted folk before succumbing to an overdose in 1975. Jeff, who was eight at the time, wasn’t invited to the funeral. Nevertheless, Tim’s 1969 album Blue Afternoon makes for a solid supplemental pairing. It opens with a song called “Happy Time,” which is as sad and deep as any song on Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, or any character wandering through McHugh’s Henbane.