The Glister

Mesmerizing, beautiful, sad and hopeful. This is a deeply spiritual and haunting book. I can't stop thinking about it.

THE GLISTER John Burnside Doubleday/Nan A Talese 2008 This is not horror of the Stephen King variety (though i have nothing against SK)....rather it is cerebral....almost to a fault..meaning one can get lost in the atmosphere, both of the writing itself, and the setting of the story....to the point that one forgets that not much is actually happening,,,,that being said. An abandoned chemical plant still awash in toxins...becomes the refuge of disaffected youth in the town that once depended on it..the town itself dying from civic apathy, cultural decline..the vestiges of corporate greed...severe ennui...and various odd cancers Every year or so a boy from the local school has gone missing in the local Poisoned Woods. The local policeman, aware of the fact that these have actually been deaths..ritual killings......is also aware of the means by which they have been covered up...and suffers the usual pangs of guilt.A group of local youth decides to take matters into their own hands...or at least bring someone to Justice....with disastrous results..after a particularly violent bit of Avenging, one of the boys, Leonard, teams up with a fellow denizen of The Bad Place...and all hell proceeds to break loose in ways brutal, pathetic, and Biblical..ritual killing and an Infernal Machine.complete the steps to Oblivion Imagine being a witness to your own death? Imagine that you are but one in a chain? Imagine being aware of these facts at the one moment when it is too late for that awareness to matter? this was one of the best books i have read in a long while 5 Stars *this is a review of an ARC*

Although for some reason Burnside is being compared by his stateside publisher to Stephen King, he writes more like James Dickey; he's a poet venturing into prose with an eye for complicated and telling detail, for the layers that people build over their lives to deceive not only outsiders but also themselves; and his writing is jaw-droppingly beautiful. The book is set in "Innertown," a tract of poisoned industrial wasteland in England, in which the adults have simply yielded all authority-- the fathers ill with cancers, the mothers mysteriously absent-- and the children roam free, living out something a bit like Lord of the Flies in an abandoned factory. Desperate to touch and be touched, unable to do so in any real way, they resort to hard-edged sex, murder, and the courting of a serial killer in an attempt to make any kind of contact. It's a brutal meditation on guilt and innocence, and while it's horrifying in the way a really great work of lit can be (like Flies, for example), it doesn't offer easy answers. If Ishiguro wrote horror novels, he'd write them like this. I was caught up from the first page, and when I finished I went back and read the beginning again; I thought about this book for weeks after I finished it, and have been hunting down the author's other books. If you like beautifully written, thought-provoking novels, and are willing to tolerate an ambiguous ending if it works perfectly with the rest of the book, then ignore the bad reviews here and give this a try. (I was just stunned that this book got bad reviews, but suspect it has something to do with the terrible marketing decisions made by the publisher: this book has nothing to do with straight-up horror jaunts like The Ruins or Stephen King's outings (and almost everything in the blurb is wrong). This may be why people have felt disappointed.)

Past a small dreary town, through a poisoned wood, there sits the ruins of a chemical factory. The factory was once the heart and purpose of the town, but it is shut down now, abandoned and decaying. The people are sick and, without options, stay there to die mysterious and painful deaths. But for the teenage boys of Innertown, the most immediate threat is random, unseen and almost unacknowledged. In THE GLISTER by John Burnside, teenage boys disappear --- not very often and not very many, but enough to convince 15-year-old Leonard that he is not at all safe in his hometown. Like his fellow teenagers charged with caring for dying parents, he dreams of leaving Innertown but isn't sure how to do so. He escapes instead through the meager literary offerings in the library, sex with his emotionally distant girlfriend and contemplative time at the old chemical plant. His mother is gone, his father mute and damaged, and the other adults around him unable to protect him from the violence and illness that is killing Innertown. Burnside's tale is beautiful and menacing, toxic and alluring, like the empty and sinister chemical plant that has poisoned Innertown. Though told from the perspective of several characters, this is really Leonard's book --- at once a coming-of-age tale, a murder mystery, a horror story and an apocalyptic warning about industry and responsibility. Leonard is a tender and an innocent young man, though guilty of many trespasses, and he embodies the complexities, fears, anxiety and desperation of Innertown. When Leonard finds himself in the heart of the chemical plant, with a stranger he thought was his friend, he comes face to face with the evil that the plant has manifested --- the Glister. In a frightening and lyrical ending, readers must decide for themselves what the Glister actually is and what is really haunting the woods and the chemical plant. THE GLISTER is a short book, but there is much to enjoy, recoil from and decipher in its pages. Burnside's command of language is obvious, lending a poetic quality to this scary novel. Like a post-modern fairy tale, it explores life and death and the end of childhood as well as bigger ideas about society, greed and apathy. Burnside's latest is ambiguous, and that may not satisfy all readers. Leonard confronts all degrees of evil, and before he, and readers, can come to any conclusions, the narration changes gears, delivering an unforgettable ending. For those willing to follow Burnside to the shadowy and uncertain world of Innertown, a thought-provoking, challenging and original conclusion-without-a-conclusion awaits. --- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman

I read a prepub of this book. John Burnside can paint a picture as well as John Updike. You are right there experiencing and seeing the same things as the characters. Scary story. You will love it.