A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain by Adrianne Harun
My rating: 5/5 cats
See, you know us. Or think you do.
i loved this book.
it reminded me very much of Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone which is a sort of short story cycle/novel about a group of young folk who encounter the devil in small-town germany and the havoc he creates in their town and to their relationships. this one is more of a complete novel than Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone, because there is a clear story arc, but there are also scattered vignettes that stand alone as folk-tale chapters which reemphasize the haunted tone of the book without contributing to the story arc itself.
and it is just masterful. it hits all my personal buttons: my love of carefully doled-out magical realism, my love of grit lit, and my love of pure storytellers; writers who are able to engage the reader with a direct storyline instead of alienating showy flourishes. complicated, important stories are best told in an accessible way, and since her intent is to raise awareness for this terribly real situation while still telling an interesting story, she has achieved a perfect voice here; an eerily beautiful and haunting story wrapped around real outrage.
that isn’t to say that there isn’t gorgeous prose here. direct and simple storytelling does not, to me, mean flat or serviceable. it’s about the easy recognition of ourselves in the stories of others, and the novelty of a life not your own.
the attraction of storytelling comes into play in this book, as a resident encounters a newcomer and waits eagerly to hear something “new,” something “other.”
Jackie wanted to ask so much that she couldn’t ask anything, could only wait hopelessly for Hana to tell her tale.
Almost everybody who shows up here has a story, usually embellished and smoothed out. That’s one big difference right off between those who arrive and those who live here. Our own stories were unedited – sprawling and unpretty – and nothing could clip and shape and redefine them as long as we stayed here. As long as we were alive. In fact, our stories started out messy, our families telling tales on us as mere infants, cataloging all our peculiarities in the womb and pinning them on us as soon as we arrived so that even our good points became barbs, jabbed back at us whenever we got in the way. In a place like this, the stories circulate over and over and grow flatter with each pass, and it’s no wonder townies got hungry for new ones, ones with more drama, which more or less explains our behavior. No one wants bad news, but it’s something to tell.
for me, the setting is perfect. what draws me to grit lit is its emphasis on location, on isolation, shedding light on rural communities whose inhabitants struggle against nature, poverty, and the temptation of the easy escapes of drugs and alcohol. the poetry of unsung heroics and the bitterness of yielding to despair. grit lit is the modern-day equivalent of my beloved steinbeck and thomas hardy, and these stories never get old to me.
this one is a little twist for me on my normal grit lit, in that it takes place in british columbia, where the inhabitants are a mixture of the descendants of european immigrants and the native kitselas and haisla tribes. There is a lot of casual racism towards mixed-blood and pure first nation people, which further splinters an already isolated populace, but even with this fragmentation, there is still a profound sense of “us” vs “outsiders.”
The way we see this place is different from how you would if, say, you were a vanload of senior climbers come for a camping trip from the city or the exiled Bavarian wife of the lumber executive constantly comparing our forests with those of your youth or a Kitselas woman working your first job at the Centre after pushing through the community college and nearly collapsing under a daily weight of disregard so that you vibrate with the dual desire to both shake and embrace everyone you meet. Or different, say, then if you are one of those kids common here who begin drinking in the womb and keep it up, starting early in the day, driving trucks as old as Bryan’s straight off the graveled, icy logging roads. You only know boredom and splintered light and the constant nagging in your heart to get out, get out, get out.
even without the supernatural element, there is enough real-world danger to supply the tension. the threat of fire in a heavily wooded community, plus a backwoods crime family and their cronies rolling through town getting people hooked on drugs and alcohol, with family ties to the law and enough buried bodies to ensure no one will be stupid enough to oppose them, preying on the limited prospects of the downtrodden inhabitants who have given up on a better life.
Moonjuice, Wildwood Mash – these were refined compared with Flacker’s home-burnt brew, which was just two steps away from antifreeze. It addled those kids, took away their sight and gave them endless gut pains that if they were lucky they could relieve by massive bouts of vomiting as they began to sober up. Give ’em a week (or even a couple of nights) to recover and back they’d go.
It’s not that we’re stupid, we all could tell you that. Screw that.
No, take any one of the kids from around here and set him down in a leafy city neighborhood with all the advantages and see what he can do. Guarantee you, you’d see right away the difference between your average coddled suburban kid and one with innate smarts. No, ignorance is not a choice here. But what else do they have? Most of the kids aren’t getting away, and those who head up to Flacker’s know the world conspired against their kind so long ago it’s like they’re at the bottom of a murky, shit-filled trench, and they might as well splash about until they drown as wait around for someone to outright crush them.
into this already-fraught existence come several newcomers, individuals who lead others into temptation and prey upon their restlessness, their sense of justice and revenge, their basest impulses and their longing to be seen and loved.
and hell follows with them.
i cannot recommend this highly enough. it does everything a great novel should do, and it is a true, riveting page-turner. i read it in one, fever-addled sick day, and it made me forget, for a time, all my physical discomfort, because i needed to know what was going to happen next.
an amazing book – highly recommended. by me.
also – it opens with a leonard cohen quote and later has a more prolonged leonard cohen segment. could i love it more??
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from the acknowledgments:
The story here was sparked by outrage over the ongoing murders and disappearances of aboriginal women along Highway 16, the so-called Highway of Tears, in northern British Columbia, a situation that needs as much light as can be shined upon it – and energy and solutions.
review to come, when my fever abates, but for now:
wonderful, amazing, wonderful wonderful.
