Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley
My rating: 5/5 cats
what an unexpectedly delightful book.
i was given an ARC of this and i looked at it and said “gak – biiirrrddss!” and figured i would read it when i got around to it. after some awfully gentle prodding, i got around to it and i read the damn thing in one day, tear-assing through it with great glee and awe.
this book is a sad and unpredictable gem.
but with plenty of moments of humor.
it opens with a death-by-overdose and a million instances of the word “ass-hat” – a word i had never heard before being on this site, so it grabbed my attention right from the start, and i placed in that mental category of “books that would never have been marketed to kids when i was a kid,” when we had to read sanitized books while walking uphill both ways yadda yadda.
and then it really gets going, and blossoms into two separate stories that eventually dovetail, but not in a way that is predictable. this book kept playfully yanking the rug up from under my feet until it finally all came together. this is great writing.
the best thing about this book is that it feels like magical realism even though there is nothing decidedly magical about it. it feels like there is something subterranean that wants to push through and release all this crazy stuff into the text, but it is being carefully suppressed, like a laugh at a funeral. there is a lingering presence of magical possibility that is felt but never revealed.
mostly it is quietly sad. it doesn’t make a big tearful spectacle of itself, even though since the centerpiece of the story is the disappearance of a fifteen year old boy, it could have easily gone that route. but its moments of sadness manifest themselves in small and understated scenes; details really. again, it is very cleverly handled.
the only thing i wasn’t crazy about was his single writer’s quirk: to insert paragraphs beginning with “when one” as in “when one is lying on the floor of his bedroom exactly ten weeks and three days after his brother has vanished off the face of the earth, he begins to imagine a grandiose scene.” which punctuate the narrative as these little distancing techniques the narrator uses to slip into a world of fantasy, often about zombies, which is fine, but the repetition of the phrase “when one is” got on my reading nerves a little, like a skip in a record. but overall a charming and endearing book, and i will read any book this man ever writes, hopefully as an ARC so i can get in there before anyone else.
