Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone by Stefan Kiesbye
My rating: 4/5 cats
this book was an easy near-five stars for me.
it opens with a funeral scene in rural germany – three men and a woman attend the burial of a woman; a childhood friend. there is an awkward conversation, sprinkled with resentment and innuendo. at the close of the prologue, the woman triumphantly pisses on the grave.
everyone’s got grudges…
what follows is a series of short stories, alternating between the perspectives of all five characters, as they dispassionately recount the horrific (to the reader) childhood experiences occurring in their deliberately insular village of hemmersmoor. they are all told in first-person past-tense, so it is unclear whether they are remembrancing things past as adults, or narrating the stories as children, but i prefer to think that they are told in the voice of a child, self-reflecting; musing on things just-past with only themselves as audience.
kids are scary. you know this, right?
and this village helps to foster the scary. small villages, cut off from the rest of the world make their own rules. here, “murder” is just another word for “justice,” and superstition, tradition, folklore, and magic have the power to shape destinies. there will be incest, arson, facial scarring,character assassination, cannibalism, and soul-stealing. just to begin with.
the stories are narrated in a very straightforward, matter-of-fact manner. this is german horror, after all. it is quietly chilling, rather than going for grand gestures. there is casual violence undercutting these stories without any real emotional response. awful things happen, and life goes on. there is an emphasis upon the erasure of the past:
Nobody shed a tear for the youths, and what had happened to the people who had lived in the camp before them, nobody was interested in either. Despite the photo in my living room, despite the vans that had delivered groceries to this other village on a daily basis, and despite the railroad track that led right through it, nobody in Hemmersmoor could say who the people in the camp had been. Nobody remembered the ones who had lived there, slept in the barracks, and died. There had never been such people.
which is probably the scariest thing of all. atrocities should leave emotional scars, but here, their fading is taken for granted, life goes on, murders become barstool anecdotes, and while individuals remember, and will eventually piss on your grave,the community-at-large will have all but forgotten, or consigned your suffering to legend.
this book comes highly recommended from me. a very under-the-skin kind of book that has a true shirley jackson feel, and not just that knee-jerk name-drop that comes when people want to describe literary horror. christian’s chapters are particularly good – just complete bland teenage sociopathy. brrrrrr
and i am a little disappointed that i have an advanced readers’ copy from ALA. reading the other reviews of this on here, it seems the published book has a feature mine lacks:
oh, it’s just a regular book doo dee doo
until you hold it under the light…
can you see that?? so cool. i love details.
