Grist Mill Road by Christopher J. Yates
My rating: 4/5 cats
The reality is there are more than two sides to most stories. Truth is seldom a lens, truth is a kaleidoscope.
the opening scene in this book is beyond rough: thirteen-year-old hannah is tied to a tree and shot with a bb gun by an older boy named matthew – shot repeatedly and in great detail – the 49th turning her eye into a dark smashed plum. this transpires while patch, the youngest of the three, watches in silence. when hannah’s screams stop abruptly after the ruination of her eye, they poke at her a bit, conclude that she’s dead, and head for home.
in general, i’m pretty inured to violence in books. i have a taste for grit lit and modern westerns, so there’s not much that can make me wince. this made me wince. it even made me vocalize – i let out an audible “duuuuude.”
because how is a reader supposed to get over that scene and want to reconnect with these characters when the book picks up 26 years later, and surprise – hannah’s alive with a prosthetic eye and married to patch? how does a writer get past that scene without just delivering a dark bleak hopeless grave of a book?
i’m not saying it’s happy trails through and through, but it’s an extraordinarily well-paced suspense novel, where the reader is constantly amassing information that causes their sympathies to shift and to second-guess everything as yates constructs a bridge between the past and the present. the whole book is secrets on top of secrets and while i wouldn’t go so far as to say that the actions of the opening scene become justified by the revelations, the circumstances surrounding it and the headspaces of the participants are at least clarified.
why does matthew do it? why doesn’t patch do anything to stop him? how the hell does hannah end up marrying patch? how does this episode affect all of them into their adult lives? what does matthew want now, showing up so unexpectedly into their lives?
all three characters contribute some of the pieces that make up the story, each in a different format: a letter from the one who perpetrated the crime, the journal of the one who watched, and…this book. Grist Mill Road is, essentially, hannah’s book – the victim of a horrific crime growing up to become a crime reporter for a new york tabloid and writing a book – this book – about her childhood experience named for the street she grew up on. patch and matthew’s sections have been gathered by hannah to finally tell the complete story of what went down on that mountain, a story each of them thought they knew but none of them had the full picture until matthew came back into their lives, jeopardizing the rickety, secret-riddled structure of their marriage.
it’s a smart story and a smart method of delivery. we get three perspectives each relying on childhood memories of an event in which emotions were high, shock was clouding perception, and whose causes and effects may be murky with misunderstandings resulting from a child’s inexperience. it’s like an even darker version of Atonement, in which three different characters live with the fallout, none more haunted than patch, whose paranoia and rage in the present-day scenes are spectacularly handled.
there’s very good tension, with a long slow simmer, and it’s even better than yates’ debut,Black Chalk. the opening scene is definitely the most squirm-inducing; if you can get through that one, you should be all right.
bonus – so much food porn.
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oh my goodness, my newest my pagehabit horror box is for sure the best one yet!
not only for the book, although i have been dying to read it but had not yet bought it, so there’s a bit of extra satisfaction in being rewarded for my newfound restraint, but also the little ridealongs are so pretty and well-designed – these are my favorite ones yet and i don’t even care that i sound like a commercial. YOU sound like a commercial, so there. but look at the pretty:
is so elegant, and i want to live in that book room (that many would call a “library” but whatever, i’m sleepy)
and the pencils are genius
because you sharpen them on this little matchbook-striker thingie:
and how cool is that?
it takes so little to bring me genuinely-felt pleasure and delight.
