The Night of the Hunter (novel)

The novel grew out of a story sketch titled "The Gentleman Friend" that Grubb had worked on in late 1950. In the story, a recently widowed mother named Nellie keeps $5,000 in the household cookie jar. A salesman comes courting for Nellie but her son Jackie is suspicious of his motives. Once Grubb decided to expand "The Gentleman Friend" into a novel, he had the basis of The Night of the Hunter. It was to be his first full-length novel. The plot also incorporated the true story of serial killer Harry Powers. He was hanged in 1932 for the murders of two widows and three children in Quiet Dell, West Virginia. Because Powers preyed on lonely widows with money, he was termed a "Bluebeard" and the "Lonely Hearts Killer". ==Synopsis==

The Night of the Hunter takes place in the early 1930s in the depths of the Depression. The location is Cresap's Landing, a tiny West Virginia town along the Ohio River. John Harper (age nine) and his sister Pearl (age four) are being taunted by other children because their father Ben Harper was recently hanged. The time then shifts back to Ben awaiting the death sentence in a Moundsville Prison cell he shares with "Preacher" Harry Powell, who is serving a short stint for a lesser offense. The reader learns that Ben robbed a bank and killed two people in the process. He absconded with $10,000 ($ today) in cash. In a flashback scene, the police (who John refers to as "the blue men") are closing in on Ben. He hides the cash inside Pearl's favorite doll and tells John to never reveal where the money is, and to protect his little sister with his life. In the prison cell, Powell badgers Harper day and night for information about the stolen money, but Harper says nothing before his hanging. As soon as Powell is released from Moundsville, he heads for Cresap's Landing and starts romancing Harper's widow, Willa. Once he is convinced that she was never told the whereabouts of the cash, he focuses his attention on John and Pearl. He marries the trusting Willa to be able to command her children as their stepfather. One night, after she overhears Powell's violent rage against Pearl ("''Where's the money!'' Tell me, you little bitch, or I'll tear your arm off!"), Willa confronts her husband, who slits her throat and dumps her body in the river. He then becomes even more openly threatening toward the children. John, who has always sensed his stepfather's evil, manages to escape in the night with Pearl (and her doll) into Ben Harper's old skiff, just beyond the grasp of Powell who is chasing them. They float down the Ohio River, stopping periodically to beg farm families for food. They eventually encounter a kindly older woman, Miz Rachel Cooper, who takes care of stray, homeless children. John and Pearl enjoy a couple months of sanctuary with her before Powell tracks them down. He tells Cooper he is "a loving father come to claim his little lost lambs", but she can tell from John's demeanor that this so-called Preacher is not what he professes to be. She orders him off. He returns after dark and sneaks into her farmhouse. She wounds him with a shotgun and calls the police, who come to arrest Powell for the murder of Willa Harper. The sight of Powell pinned to the ground by "the blue men" reminds John of the trauma of seeing his father arrested. John cannot bear the burden of hiding the stolen money any longer. He runs over and beats the doll against Powell's struggling body, spilling the cash, yelling, "I can't stand it! Here! I don't want it! I don't want it! It's too much! I can't do it! Here! Here!" The ensuing trial rules that Powell must hang for murder. The novel closes with John and Pearl happily spending their first Christmas with Miz Cooper and the other stray children. ==Reception==

The novel received a laudatory review by Herbert West in The New York Times: == Editions ==

• Harper & Brothers, 1953. • Dell Publishing, 1955. D149, • Dell Publishing, 1963. • Penguin Books, 1977. • Simon & Schuster, 1988. • Kensington Publishing, 1992. • Lightyear Press, 1993. • Blackmask.com, 2005. • Penguin Classics, 2023. == Screen and stage adaptations ==

The novel was adapted for the screen in 1955 by Charles Laughton and James Agee. The film has appeared on numerous lists of the greatest films of all time. In 1992, it was added to the National Film Registry. But as one reviewer put it, despite the fact that the acclaimed film "follows the novel's outline almost to the letter", the source novel by Grubb has been largely overlooked. Grubb facilitated the screen adaptation by composing the novel in a "cinematic" manner. Simon Callow notes how the novel's "vivid, etched visual elementalmost as if in cut-out formis immediately apparent, as well as the swiftly moving succession of scenes." Grubb told Preston Neal Jones, "I had been filming Night of the Hunter in my head as I wrote it". The novel was adapted for the screen again in 1991 as a television movie with Richard Chamberlain playing the part of Preacher Harry Powell, a role that Robert Mitchum made famous in the 1955 version. Lyricist-librettist Stephen Cole and composer Claibe Richardson started working on a musical adaptation in the 1990s, releasing a concept album in 1998 through the Fynsworth Alley label. The Night of the Hunter musical premiered at the Willow's Theatre in Concord, California, on September 24, 2004. It was directed and produced by John Bowab, and starred Brian Noonan as Harry Powell, and Lynne Wintersteller as Willa. The show received mixed reviews; it later moved on to the New York Musical Theatre Festival, the last performance being on October 1, 2006. On October 29, 2023, the City Lit Theater of Chicago presented the world premiere of a Night of the Hunter stage adaptation by Shawna Tucker. It was directed by Brian Pastor, and starred Bryan Breau as Preacher, Jacqui Touchet as John, Kendal Romero as Willa, Mary Margaret McCormack as Pearl, and Shawna Tucker as Miz Cooper. == See also ==