NEWS

A professor of horror novels

by Doug Gillison

Oberlin faculty write some curious books -generally not trade novels, but more serious scholarly tracts. But scan the Oberlin author shelf in the Co-op Bookstore and, between Nancy A. Matthews' Confronting Rape and Gilbert Meilander's Limits of Love, you'll find a book with a strange epigraph: "They are innocent, small town girls-chosen to bear children of Evil."

The book, Progeny, by J. G. Maxon, is accompanied by Lethal Delivery, ("Order now. Die later"). J. G. Maxon is Politics department chair Benjamin N. Schiff and his wife, June Goodwin. "J. G. are my wife's initials," said Schiff. "We chose 'Maxon' because it's in the middle of the alphabet, near some famous authors like Ludlow. But we never became quite as popular." Professor Ben Schiff

Under his real name, Schiff wrote International Nuclear Technology Transfer: "Dilemmas of Dissemination and Control." Between the two, Schiff and Goodwin have written three other books on world affairs. In 1995, they co-authored Heart of Whiteness: Afrikaners Face Black Rule in the New South Africa. South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu claims the book is "thoroughly gripping and fascinating."

Schiff and Goodwin first started planning to write thrillers together in 1983, soon after their arrival at Oberlin. Earlier, Goodwin had worked for Reuters in the late '60s and was a foreign correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor in Africa.

"There just weren't a whole lot of writing positions available here, when we arrived," said Goodwin. "It paid for our car, which we still have." According to Schiff, Progeny took nearly six years to write. "My husband thought it was a joke until I started writing it," said Goodwin.

Progeny is about a series of unexplained pregnancies of very young girls in a small, northeast Ohio town, not unlike Oberlin. "[That] was about the worst thing we could imagine," said Schiff.

Six months after the appearance of Progeny, Schiff and Goodwin completed another thriller, Lethal Delivery, about a mad bomber working in a mail order company. "From the streets of New York to suburban Ohio," the back cover reads, "he's parceling out death and destruction."

"When he writes, I edit," said Goodwin. "He's good at plots and I am pretty good at poetic settings. It was enormous fun."

Schiff claims that there is little direct connection between his work with Goodwin and their fiction. "The only connection is in the sense that we needed to develop a more compelling writing style and writing thrillers was real good practice," he said.

Schiff said he and his wife have no intention of writing another thriller. "It's not very lucrative," he said.

The prose in Progeny is a bit more demanding than that of most books of its genre and seems to have a sly twist of symbolic appreciation to it, things that might be passed over by the general psychological suspense readership.

Describing a dying tulip, it reads, "Six inky blue stamens projected upward surrounding the yellow pistil, which was pinched into three sections on the top. What was left looked like a tool of some kind. The tip of a Phillips screwdriver. The petals were bright as ever, and firm."

Schiff said their plans changed after Progeny was published. Lethal Delivery was published soon after Progeny to fulfill their contract. "We had hoped to become the next Steven King," said Schiff "But by the time we wrote Lethal Delivery, we were tired of the whole thing."


Photo:
J. G. Maxon: Professor of Politics Ben Schiff and his wife June Goodwin collaborated on two novels. (photo by Noah Mewborn)

 

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Copyright © 1998, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 127, Number 11, December 4, 1998

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