Incidental Haunted House Month! Hell House

Hell House by Richard Matheson

Horror (1971 - 301 pp.)

The year 2021 marks Hell House's 50-year anniversary. What a perfect time for more Richard Matheson on this blog, after 2013's entry on I Am Legend and 2019's entry on Somewhere in Time. It also marks the second haunted house-related entry in June 2021, after Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle.*

In Hell House, physicist Lionel Barrett, his wife Edith, spiritual medium Florence Tanner and physical medium Benjamin Franklin Fischer are offered $100,000 by aging plutocrat William Reinhardt Deutsch to investigate the Belasco House, the apparently most haunted house in the world, in Maine in 1970. Previous attempts in 1930 and 1940 had been catastrophic, with most of the investigators dying; a young Ben was part of the 1940 team. Lionel comes armed with the Reversor, a machine that is supposed to negate the electromagnetic energy he believes to be causing the haunting, whereas Florence is more concerned with connecting with the house's energy on a spiritual level. Ben, drawing on his terrifying past experience, wants to use his physical energy to draw out the haunting more gradually. Edith is given no qualification other than being Lionel's wife.

The family patriarch Emeric Belasco had apparently been an early 20th century man of some importance, had many guests, murdered or disfigured many of them, and murdered his son Daniel. As in any Clue-style mansion, the action occurs not only in such mundane rooms as bedrooms, but also in the steam room, swimming pool and chapel. In what I sincerely hope is not a spoiler, the house is indeed haunted.

Matheson's language is middling in description, sticking to the main characters while offering few details about the house's architecture. By the middle of the book, I could imagine Florence standing right in front of me, but I could not imagine what any of the bathrooms look like. Matheson makes the action work by using short, choppy sentences during horror scenes, such as Florence's descent to the cellar in search of Daniel Belasco's body:

She cried out as unseen hands clutched her by the throat. She reached up and began to grapple with the hands. They were cold and moist. She yanked them away and staggered to the side. Regaining direction, she lunged for the wall. (116)

Matheson uses similarly staccato wording when spirits chase Edith later in the book, keeping up the tension, which produces horror that is actually scary:

Darkness fled; she was acutely conscious, knowing even as she flung herself into the empty doorway that she hadn't been allowed to faint. She lunged into the corridor and headed for the stairs. The air was thick with mist. (270)

Other linguistic intrigues include the use of pseudoscientific language to add to the eeriness, such as Lionel referring to "teleplasmic" (93) energy used by his Reversor machine, as well as intense descriptions of gore best left to the reader (184, 267).

Although Hell House has an ensemble cast, Florence is arguably the protagonist. She is the primary victim of the book's grisly body horror, nearly torn to shreds by the book's end. Early on, Edith demurs at how beautiful Florence** is, while Florence's naked body is described in a moderate amount of detail. (95) Florence's body, beautiful as Edith finds it, ends up being a "living puppet", which leads to a scene even I was surprised to read. (242)

When Florence ends up with teeth marks around her nipples, purportedly made by the spirit of Daniel Belasco, the other investigators struggle to believe her (120-121); after a similar attack to her head, they openly wonder whether she is injuring herself during psychotic breaks. This raises a question that I was shocked was never answered. Find a solid chocolate bar, such as a Dairy Milk or Jersey Milk, and take a bite out of it. You'll see that the marks made in the remaining chocolate are shaped differently based on your top and bottom teeth, which are shaped differently. If Florence had bitten her own breasts, the bite marks would appear upside down, as she would have to bring her breast up to her face, so that her top teeth marks would be below her nipple. If the bite marks were right-side up, with the top teeth marks above the nipple, someone else must have done the biting. Matheson's narrator never tells the reader the direction of the bite marks, nor do the characters seem to bother inquiring.

Although Hell House was filmed as The Legend of Hell House in 1973, with Matheson writing the script, Hell House would likely be unfilmable*** today. Hell House's first 50 pages are relatively uneventful, making any properly proportioned movie a slow burn like Psycho more than a modern thriller. The characters' social norms are firmly rooted in Matheson's era, resembling Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land more than anything a modern feminist might appreciate. The Florence body horror scenes would especially shock 2021 audiences' consciences, or else they would have to be so toned down they would lose what makes them scary. (Not because of the gore, to which we are all properly desensitized in this post-Saw world, but in the way the scenes sensationalize the abuse of women.) Hell House's gruesome combination of sex and gore could have worked in the '80s and '90s slasher heyday, but would be seen as retrograde now. For a truly retro comparison, think of how the naturalistic, gory Grand Guignol theatres of 1920s France would not have been seen as appropriate fare during the straight-laced 1950s.

Not only does Hell House feel set in the past because it is too edgy for the present, even the characters' names reflect this. Edith and Florence are names people would have had in 1971 - if they had been 80 years old. (Lionel is slightly more modern, peaking in the 1920s before making a surprising resurgence in the 21st century.) Each of the characters is in his or her 40s, though. Ben is the most pointed example, having been named directly after Benjamin Franklin, (146) who far predates any of the book's events. The Franklin comparison is apt for Ben's calm, patient style of physical medium practice, which can be compared to Franklin's kite experiment, finding ambient electrical charge by relatively simple means.

Although Matheson often straddles genres, at times writing what appears to be science fiction without using any science (Matheson was a journalist by training, for reference), the science fiction nerd in me has to ask: how on Earth does the Reversor work? Although there are vivid descriptions of Florence's medium work during times when the Reversor is operating, a blood and guts description of the Reversor's mechanisms would have been fun. Then again, if the Reversor were so readily describable, we'd all have to live with a different horror: that of some smart young engineer making a homemade Reversor.

Although Hell House isn't as strong a work as Somewhere in Time, and especially not as strong as Matheson's classic I Am Legend, it reads even faster. Once you get past page 100, you won't put it down. As much as I'd recommend Hell House for Halloween, the events take place from December 20-24, 1970. Step aside, Nightmare Before Christmas. It's tough to imagine scarier Christmas entertainment than Hell House.

Ease of Reading: 9

Educational Content: 1

*In a strange coincidence, this is the second consecutive June featuring an incidental theme. June 2020 was Incidental Japan Month, when I read Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 and James Clavell's Shogun. Each of these books addresses a very different Japan, whereas each of June 2021's haunted house books are set in 20th-century New England.

**Florence is described as being 43 years old at the time of the investigation. This may be a feather in the cap of the "older models are pretty too" movement. However, it also makes the casting choice of 23-year-old Pamela Franklin in the 1973 movie The Legend of Hell House a curious one. I haven't yet seen the movie, but it looks like it'd pair well with my popcorn machine.

***New word? It might just be! I need to post a lexicon of all the words I improvise. What they all have in common is that they're close enough to existing words that their meanings are easy to derive from context.

Bonus Book! We Have Always Lived in the Castle

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

Horror (1962 - 186 pp.)

Of Shirley Jackson's work, I was previously only familiar with "The Lottery", which I read - and loved - years ago, as well as the fantastic Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House. According to Jackson's biographer Judy Oppenheimer, when Jackson's physical and mental health deteriorated, her protagonists' own health went with it, in an extreme version of Real Life Writes the Plot. As We Have Always Lived in the Castle is Jackson's last, and purportedly best, work, it stands to reason that protagonist Mary Katherine ("Merricat") Blackwood is completely psychotic. Jackson does not disappoint.

The narrator, 18-year-old Merricat, lives with her 28-year-old sister Constance, their elderly uncle Julian, and, for a brief period during the book's second half, their 32-year-old cousin Charles. They inhabit the family home, located on a sprawling estate somewhere in New England, where Constance and Julian never leave. It falls to Merricat, and later Charles, to go shopping in the nearby village for books and groceries. Merricat is shunned by the villagers. The reader quickly finds out why; six years prior to the book, most of the Blackwood family died by arsenic poisoning, leaving only Merricat (who was not at dinner), Constance (who did not eat any poison) and Julian (who ate a small portion of poison, leaving him permanently disabled). Constance was charged with the murders but acquitted, although that helps her little in the local court of public opinion. The home dynamic resembles the classic 1962 movie What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, making 1962 a year marked by uncomfortable home drama creepiness.*

I saw the reveal (143) coming from essentially the start of the book, yet I was still impressed with Jackson's foreshadowing. Without spoiling any plot point, Merricat's frequent info dumping of her likes and dislikes, her predilections, and her deep-seated but unexplained hatreds come through numerous times. 

Where my perception of the book differs more from the traditional critical take is that I consider Charles to be a genuine good guy. He is preoccupied with the family fortune, but given how much longer Merricat and Constance have to live, the sisters should be thinking about money more. By contrast, in one scene, Merricat buries a substantial sum under the lawn, which Constance laughs off as an expression of Merricat's love of burying things. (115-116) Charles is frequently furious at the other characters, and rightly so; Merricat attempts to ward him off using magic, Julian calls Charles "John" after the deceased family patriarch, and Constance considers all of this and more to be perfectly tolerable. Meanwhile, Charles is so perplexed by Merricat's hostility toward him that he asks Jonas, "How can I make Cousin Mary like me?" (90) When Charles finally gives up on restoring the family relationship and finances, there is nothing left for Jackson to write. The Charles/Constance break is more of a game over for the Blackwood family than the original deaths or the housefire.

A subject that gripped me throughout the book is just how small the house's inhabitants' worlds are. For a book released contemporaneously with the Cuban Missile Crisis, there is no mention of the Cold War, no hint that any of the older characters could have been World War II veterans, and no mention of any place outside the small, unnamed New England village where Merricat shops. At the very start of the book, when Merricat passes the general store, she notes that "[i]n this village the men stayed young and did the gossiping and the women aged with grey evil weariness and stood silently waiting for the men to get up and come home." (13) It borders on preposterous that any character within Merricat's reclusive perception would ever think outside the boundaries of the village, which may as well be on a deserted island in the middle of the Pacific.** This geographic isolation presents the Blackwoods' situation as retrograde, so We Have Always Lived in the Castle would be believable as a period piece set as early as the American Civil War. More currently, it calls to mind pandemic-related isolation, as well as life in a hotel. Would Zoom have helped the Blackwoods, or would it have simply been another medium for shunning them?

I was stunned to learn that We Have Always Lived in the Castle was never released as a feature movie until 2018. With its film-friendly horror genre and deranged narrator, clocking in at a svelte 48,140 words, it seems like a logical choice for the big screen. On top of that, We Have Always Lived in the Castle would have virtually zero special effects. Of course, the movie is not available in Canada on any of the streaming services I have, so the question is moot anyway. Merricat's narration*** is scary enough.

Ease of Reading: 9

Educational Content: 2

*1962 is also the release year of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. By pure coincidence, 1962 was apparently a good year to release a novel ending in the word "Castle".

**Ironically, it is easier to imagine various science fiction characters who roam the galaxy jumping from solar system to solar system than to imagine Merricat, Constance or Julian walking two villages over.

***For a 1962-written comparison (what a year!), Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest intersects unreliable first-person narration with palpable mental illness. Books are arguably the best media at entering a narrator's head, especially with narrators like Merricat, who never even tell the reader what they look like, and tend to smash mirrors anyhow.

Up Close with Ontario's 2021 Gypsy Moth Explosion

2021 has seen one of the largest incidences of gypsy moths in Ontario in recent memory, eclipsing last year's gypsy moth bonanza. They're eating foliage.* They're "everywhere", causing "the worst infestation since the eighties". In a particularly scathing assessment, the Ottawa Citizen called gypsy moths, their caterpillars and their eggs "a cataclysmic insult".

Gypsy moth caterpillars "literally rain down out of the sky". 

They sure rained on me in the North Kawarthas earlier this month:

They crawled on my skin only briefly, so I didn't suffer any gypsy moth rash. They were actually kind of cute, as they periodically rear their front legs like tiny horses. Besides, who can resist something so small and fuzzy?**

Nonetheless, a pest is a pest, and a generally anti-pesticide person except when it's absolutely necessary, I thought: do any birds eat these critters?

The answer is that yes, they do, including some of Ontario's most iconic bird species. According to this Michigan State University bulletin from all the way back in April 1999:

Many birds do not like to feed on large, hairy gypsy moth caterpillars, but other species seem to relish them! Yellow-billed and black-billed cuckoos, blue jays, orioles and rufous-sided towhees are among the species that feed on gypsy moth caterpillars. Some birds, such as the black-capped chickadee, will also feed on egg masses and can sometimes cause substantial egg mortality.

Here's a closeup I snapped of a chickadee last October:

Either this one, or a similar chickadee, was so friendly it landed on my shoe - while it was on my foot. It was unfortunately too quick for me to get a picture, but these adorable chickadees apparently consider Eastern Ontario so familiar they're willing to land on its human inhabitants.

I've seen more blue jays farther south (in Toronto - how fitting), so it'd be nice to see them up in cottage country. I can't recall the last time I saw a cuckoo, a towhee or an oriole, but they'd be welcome.

One final issue: Terry McGlynn, the ecologist and conservationist who named the completely unrelated gypsy ants, regrets using the racist term "gypsy". In the interest of naming things, let's rename gypsy moths! Here are a few fun ideas:

• Destroyer moth, based on its Latin name Lymantria dispar
• Day moth or Sun moth, based on the fact that it is unusually diurnal
• Striped tree moth, based on its jagged stripe markings

I'm open to more ideas and fewer moths. Let's cross our fingers for an increase in the presence of local avians.

*I don't usually toot my own horn, but here, I must: my pictures are better than these Canadian Press pictures. Matthew Gordon, Ontario's new nature photographer?

**Remember Weepuls? Gypsy moth caterpillars are like living, elongated Weepuls.

June's Book: The Red Badge of Courage

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

War (1895 - 79 pp.)

In The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane tells a quintessential story about 18-year-old Henry Fielding,  a fresh recruit in the Union army in the Civil War. Crane was born in 1871, too late to serve in the Civil War, although he conducted an impressive dive into archival war research. He later served as a war correspondent in Greece during the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, a conflict perhaps best known in the United States for being covered by Crane. His other experiences include being stranded in a dinghy for 30 hours.* After all this, Crane died at age 28 in a sanatorium in the Black Forest. I rarely discuss authors' lives in such detail on here, typically preferring intrinsic analysis, but Crane's life is asking for a biopic. How I had somehow managed to read so much literature without encountering his work is a mystery to me, especially considering I have completed a course on American literature up to 1900.

The Red Badge of Courage is reminiscent of other turn-of-the-century** American adventure stories like White Fang and "A Resumed Identity", in terms of pulpy style and boundless optimism. Crane lived and wrote in arguably the most wide-eyed, forward-thinking era in American history, which shows in his use of the Civil War as a backdrop for camaraderie, wit, and the ability for a young man to learn how to take charge. Later Civil War stories showcase the war's brutality, such as in Bring the Jubilee, but Crane is content to have his teenage soldiers learn militaristic values. Fielding and his friend Wilson are shuttled around to different battlefields, at times carrying rifles or bearing standards. In a Looney Tunes-esque series of incidents, Fielding is whacked with a rifle, shot in the head just enough for it to hurt, and taken aback at how new some of the Confederate uniforms are.^ 

Crane's writing is fast-paced and magazine-like, with plenty of imagery. An early example of a battle scene could have been used as a US Army recruitment ad:^^

Bullets began to whistle among the branches of the trees. Showers of pine needles and pieces of wood came falling down. It was as if a thousand axes were being used.

The lieutenant of the youth’s regiment was shot in the hand. He began to curse so magnificently that a nervous laugh went through the regiment. It relieved the tightened senses of the men. (60)

The Red Badge of Courage is such an easy read, especially by the standards of often dense 19th-century fiction, I am stunned it is not in more educational curricula. That said, I have only ever attended high school in Ontario, where those inhabitants who do ever think about the US Civil War look on in horrified apoplexy. The phrase "Civil War" is just as likely to refer to the English Civil War here, or to the Guns 'N' Roses song.

Crane may be a difficult author to explain, values-wise. Before World War I, heroism in battle was so vaunted that soldiers would invite their own wounds: "At times he wished he were wounded. He believed persons with torn bodies were unusually happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound—a red badge of courage." (77) Although honour and duty are likely not completely expired virtues, it is difficult to identify with someone who sees the world the way Fielding sees it. Now, of course, veneration of 1890s-era values is confined to memorabilia collections. Perhaps an Art Nouveau revival is in order.

Thanks to the magic of the public domain, the book is available in its entirety here.

Ease of Reading: 9

Educational Content: 3

*Back in 2018, I was trapped in an elevator for an hour. This is the closest I have come to such a predicament. I also had a phone on me, which, suffice to say, someone in the 1890s decidedly did not.

**It never ceases to amaze me that, even after another century has turned, we still use the phrase "turn of the century" to describe the period surrounding the year 1900.

^It is unclear whether Crane's depiction of jaunty new Confederate uniforms (114) belies a lack of understanding of just how ragged Confederate uniforms tended to be, or whether Fielding lucks out by seeing what few new uniforms there were.

^^The Spanish-American War was fought three years after The Red Badge of Courage's release, and was portrayed using some of the same types of images. Teddy Roosevelt's charge up San Juan Hill could have been devised by Crane as a plot point.

Happy Victoria Day! With Happy Days All Around

Happy Victoria Day!

A view of the sky, Victoria Day 2020.

For those of us in Canada, where Victoria Day is a statutory holiday, that much was obvious. However, it turns out that there have been many other commemorative days this past week. My social media feeds are teaching me something, it seems.

On this holiday Monday of gorgeous weather and relaxing outside, on a day commemorating the monarch when Canada gained independence, let's also reflect on:

International Museum Day: Celebrated on May 18th every year, International Museum Day gives tourists and locals alike as good a reason as any to delve into the world's rich physical and cultural history. Sadly, I wasn't at a museum on May 18th in either 2020 or 2021 due to COVID-19-related restrictions, but the spirit lives on.

World Bee Day: Celebrated on May 20th every year, World Bee Day is a time to give thanks for all bees do for us, from pollenating flowers to creating delicious honey. I admired my houseplant while eating my homemade honey mustard dressing; I don't know a more festive way to celebrate from home. Remember, colony collapse is a science fiction-level disaster. Buzz on!

World Turtle Day: Shellebrated* on May 23rd every year, World Turtle Day lets us all watch Franklin, dream of post-pandemic Galapagos adventures, and withdraw into our shells at the end of a long, exhausting day. I wasn't sure how to mark the occasion, so 

On some other year, Victoria Day may fall on any of these days. Victoria Day is, by definition, the Monday on or before May 24, meaning it will always fall on May 18-24. I like it best this way, celebrating four days instead of three. If you've heard of these other fine days, now you get to see them all in one place.

Bzzzt!

*The World Turtle Day website encourages the use of this groan-worthy pun. Don't shoot the messenger.

May's Book: The Road

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Post-Apocalypse (2006 - 287 pp.)

Cormac McCarthy's The Road became a feature film within three years of its release (2009). I saw it when it came out, at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema in Toronto. Usually, I read a book before watching the movie. In the case of The Road, watching the movie first helped me read the book.

The Road follows the lonely story of a man and his son travelling by foot across an unnamed portion of a post-apocalyptic United States of America. No character is ever named, even in memories, but there's never an everyman feel to The Road because of how non-relatable the experience is. The Road is perhaps best told as a movie, aside from Viggo Mortensen's terrific acting job, because of how blurred together the various buildings and stretches of road become in McCarthy's novel. McCarthy's dialogue and imagery are intense, drawing the reader into the story, but in a disembodied way that makes it feel like the reader is never really in those haunted houses or huddled under a beaten-up scrap of tarp.

McCarthy's refusal to reveal the cause of the apocalypse is crucial to The Road's appeal, yet he weaves the story so vividly I never bother to wonder what happened. Different eras worry about different apocalypses, from foreign takeover to mutually assured destruction to who knows what. The unstated apocalypse of The Road focuses instead on the contrast between the before times, which the father remembers constantly but exist only as a haze to the son, and the after times, which are so rife with danger that survival is the only goal. When the father recalls the before times early on, when the mother is still alive, "She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame." (19) McCarthy presents it as though it is a still from an old movie, the film wearing away with time as the owner frets over losing a memory. The after times are so bereft of options that the reader never stops to wonder what the father used to do for a living or where the son would have gone to school. The Road must have been simultaneously easy and difficult to write: easy in that a lot of character background can be omitted, difficult in that each scene has to shuffle the deck in terms of ways to portray life on the eponymous road.

The tensest moments are when the father and the son encounter other people. The floor hatch scene, (in)famous for how scary it is in the movie, makes the reader's heart beat faster just as the characters' hearts do. For all the monotony that most of the road entails, the main challenge being the stripped-down version of nature the characters endure, human threats present some of the greatest difficulties: "Run, he whispered. We have to run." (111) Conversely, the father and the son stay for short stretches in various abandoned houses, where the presumably deceased former inhabitants leave behind canned foods for our heroes' taste treats. Coca-Cola, canned pears, and canned tuna are among the best finds. As canned food evolves, a more futuristic take on The Road could feature anything from canned tom yum to canned butter chicken soup - but that would be cold (heated-up?) comfort to future characters.

For all the harshness of nature, whether it's the burnt-out ex-farmland or the oncoming winter, wildlife never seem to be a concern. Bears and wolves, if they still exist, don't appear tempted by the stacks of supplies people leave out while they go for walks on the beach. Humans, not animals, are the scavengers. The lack of corporeal wildlife makes the mere mention of animals as a conversation topic into spiritual subject matter. When the father and the son discuss the phrase "as the crow flies", the conversation quickly turns toward crows' lack of need to follow the road, charting their paths all over (but not as far as Mars), prompting the boy to ask: "If you were a crow could you fly up high enough to see the sun?" (158) It's refreshing to see some of the world's smartest avians presented as stand-ins for dreams of freedom rather than as stand-ins for death. Euphemistically left out of the corvid banter is that if people, who can open cans for food, are so starving, crows' situations must be at least as bad, if not worse.

The relationship between The Road's characters and freedom is a strained one. With society destroyed, there's no one left to tax, compel, or otherwise corral the characters. There's also nothing left to fight for. There's no freedom to do anything, as anything worth doing is irreparably lost, like a Toronto Raptors game during the COVID-19 pandemic but for all time. It also means that anytime a possession is lost, whether it's an article of clothing or a frying pan, replacing that item is a morbid scavenger hunt. Some of the people the father and son pass on the road stink and are wearing rags.

Amorality reigns in The Road, but the father grounds the son by repeatedly insisting that they're "the good guys". The bad guys are highway robbers, so by refusing to rob from others, or do anything worse, while repelling any robbers they meet, the father and the son become good guys by default. The son, who has few memories of the before times, ingrains the good guys/bad guys duality as his morality, in the absence of anything else. Near the end of the book, he asks a kindly stranger on the beach:

How do I know youre** one of the good guys?

The stranger answers:

You dont. You'll have to take a shot. (283) 

The guessing game the father and son play - deciding which houses to enter, which people to approach or avoid, which places to sleep - is totally encapsulated in those two lines.

Neither good nor bad, The Road is verbose. McCarthy uses words I didn't know frequently enough that I didn't bother looking up many of them, as I can generally tell what he means through context. Sometimes, the terminology creates a darkly medical atmosphere, as in "rachitic"; at other times, entire sentences are composed mainly of 7+ letter words. The density of the language adds to the book's dreamlike quality, as a first-person narrator would never describe the world with such arcaneness.

My emotional connection to the book revolves around the growing awareness of just how much I have, as does everyone I know. Something as mundane as a dish towel - there are four of them hanging in front of my oven - borders on unthinkable in The Road's world. I'm surrounded by outlets, which power all manners of electrical devices that occupy my time during the stay at home order; in The Road, electrical power is non-existent. When I lock my door, I feel content that I'm safe from whomever may lurk beyond my premises... but, as in post-apocalyptic fiction more generally,* the father and the son don't even feel safe when they're barricaded in a basement.

They have nothing, yet the pass the time they have, just like we all do. I'm just thankful for all the lighting, shelter and fresh food.

Ease of Reading: 8

Educational Content: 1

*Now there's a good novel study project: comparing the highway robbers in The Road to the vampires in I Am Legend.

**At various points, McCarthy omits apostrophes in contractions. It makes the book feel more scrawled down, although the presence of apostrophes in other places confuses the matter.

Bonus Book! Burn

Burn by Patrick Ness

Fantasy (2020 - 371 pp.)

I don't usually read young adult fantasy novels, but when I do, the back cover of Patrick Ness's Burn sets up a clear winner of a premise:

On a cold Sunday evening in 1957--the very day, in fact, that Dwight David Eisenhower took the oath of office for the second time as president of the United States of America--Sarah Dewhurst waited with her father in the parking lot of the Chevron gas station for the dragon he'd hired to help on the farm...

My mind brimmed with possibilities. Historical labour relations fiction, like In the Days of the Comet? A sleek, sober take on the '50s, a la Queen's Gambit? A fresh take on dragons, like His Majesty's Dragon and Throne of Jade? Burn is also a very impressive book physically. My hardcover copy has a beautiful black dust jacket with flames and a stylized dragon on it, thick card stock-like paper, and fully black pages starting Part 1 and Part 2. It was all there for the taking...

...and to an extent, Ness takes it. The rural Washington State setting feels real. Sarah Dewhurst and Jason Inagawa, two misunderstood teenagers who aren't the right race at the right time, develop a palpable emotional connection. FBI agents Dernovich and Woolf, tasked to track Malcolm, have a good rapport for the first hundred pages. Kazimir the blue dragon, named as a "famous destroyer (of peace)", has a bouncier personality than his role as an independently contracted farmhand would suggest. The deal at the start of the book, in which Sarah's father Gareth negotiates Kazimir down to a quarter of the asking price up front because he can't afford the rest, immediately sets off a lightbulb in the reader's head that maybe there aren't a lot of good guys in this world.

The characterization falls apart whenever a character is only required to display a certain stereotype. Deputy Sheriff Kelby is a non-character, needlessly cruel and with no discernible motivation. Miss Archer, the librarian, seems to exist for the purpose of relaying plot-related gossip to the reader. Sarah herself is prophesied* to be present when potentially world-destroying events occur, signaling the presence of religious fanatic-slash**-assassin Malcolm and his newfound lover Nelson. Everyone is misunderstood and finding him- or herself, which I understand is a staple of young adult fiction, but I really wish they'd get on with it.

Ness succeeds with the '50s setting when it captures atmosphere and technology. With the advent of the smartphone rendering entire genres obsolete, writing a period piece is a convenient way to have characters be unable to reach the outside world. The agrarian setting also works in the '50s, given the Cold War uncertainty toward anything farther than house and home. The more Ness leans on these topics, the less on characters' soliloquies on social issues, the better.*** Ness's most incisive comment about his chosen time period comes right at the end of the book, capturing the spirit of Mutually Assured Destruction and the ambient buzz of paranoia that came with it: "All annihilation was mutual in the end." (367)

Similarly, when Ness discusses dragons, he clearly enjoys it, contrasting Russian blue with Canadian red, and dragon-cleared farmland to the interior British Columbia wasteland they call home. However, there are only two dragons with speaking parts in the entirety of Burn. The book has a dragon on the cover, and is ostensibly about dragons. As a reader, I want less chatter amongst the humans, more dealing with dragons. Call this the Snakes on a Plane Effect: when I see a movie called Snakes on a Plane, I want motherfucking snakes on a motherfucking plane. Similarly, when I read a book called Burn, that has a picture of a dragon on the cover, I want dragons. On the plus side, in a bizarrely academic turn, a dragon-turned-human explains Schrodinger's theory of alternate universes. (202)

Ness pulls off one-liners that keep Burn entertaining. Shortly after Malcolm and Nelson meet, Nelson says the eerie, "A world where you never wake up? Sounds like paradise." (82) This foreshadows the alternate universes existing in Part 1 and Part 2. When Agent Dernovich's daughter Grace notices Malcolm's movements toward the Dewhurst farm, he says to her, "Your eyes, sweetie... I should have them insured, they see so much." (289) Ness is clearly a talented writer, which makes Burn's highs high and its lows all the more head-scratching.

In Part 1, Gareth receives a blackmail letter that Ness never tells us who sends the letter or why, although we can certainly guess. Some questions are never meant to be answered, and some reader itches are never meant to be scratched. I like the lack of knowing; it's scarier that way. The triangle of tension between Sarah, Gareth and Kazimir jolts the story forward, putting our main characters in danger for the first time. That visceral, up-close danger is far scarier than a regular teenager having to save the world for the 34757039509th time. Ness hints at subverting that Hunger Games-esque trope when Kazimir tells Sarah, "What you must remember throughout all of this... is that you are not special", (119) but then she is. Of course she's special. You, reader, are too.

Ease of Reading: 9

Educational Content: 1

*I'm not even bothering to have Burn take the Fantasy Novelist's Exam.

**This is a brilliant pun. When you read far enough into Burn, you will know why.

***At one point, Ness, via the third-person omniscient narrator, teaches the reader the years in which Oregon and Idaho legalized interracial marriage. Burn is not set in either of those states.