Overview
One year following their deaths in a late-night car accident, teenagers Danielle, Marco, and Christopher return, in spirit, to the sleepy New England suburb of Avon. Over the course of the evening, the three will drift into and out of the lives of those who knew and were affected by them. None is more affected than Tim, survivor of the crash, who plots a grisly act of remembrance, and Brooks, the well-intentioned police officer who first discovered the crash and whose life has changed in startling ways since.
Synopsis
One year following their deaths in a late-night car accident, teenagers Danielle, Marco, and Christopher return, in spirit, to the sleepy New England suburb of Avon. Over the course of the evening, the three will drift into and out of the lives of those who knew and were affected by them. None is more affected than Tim, survivor of the crash, who plots a grisly act of remembrance, and Brooks, the well-intentioned police officer who first discovered the crash and whose life has changed in startling ways since.
The New Yorker
Why is the Hudson Valley haunted?” Judith Richardson asks in Possessions, a study of “the history and uses of haunting” upstate. Richardson reviews the area’s bloody rebellions and wandering ghost sailors, drawing on county archives, travelogues, letters, and the usual literary sources. She finds that the valley’s ghostly legacy derives, in part, from a fraught history of land ownership, the influence of Dutch and German folklore, and a naturally ominous landscape—as well as from entrepreneurs in the tourism industry. Richardson herself seems a little susceptible to the atmosphere that spooked Ichabod Crane. The “mountains loom and brood,” she writes, and she seeks to explain “how hauntings intersect with cultural history, public memory, economics, and land issues.”
The teen-age ghosts in Stewart O’Nan’s new novel, The Night Country, also profit from native superstition. “This is still a new England, garden-green, veined with black rivers and massacres,” one of them says. The narrators were killed in a Halloween car accident, and, a year later, skittish townspeople are easy marks for their amusement. The dead are bent on revenge, which they get, of course, in an apotheosis of middle-of-the-night adolescent car rides through dark landscapes.
In Sara Gran’s Come Closer, the haunting starts in the office of a young architect, Amanda, who ignores early signs of otherworldly intervention, such as a mysterious tapping in her apartment and the delivery of a book, “Demon Possession Past and Present.” But soon she is witnessing old murders and, alas, committing new ones. Amanda’s detached and witty narration helps us believe, as she says, that “what we think is impossible happens all the time.” -- (Lauren Porcaro)
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewAlready noted for novels filled with darkly stunning themes and images (The Names of the Dead, A Prayer for the Dying), Stewart O'Nan enters the realm of the supernatural with a thoughtful, sorrowful, and moving tale that revels in its Halloween backdrop.
One year after the tragic car accident that claimed the lives of three teenagers, their families and friends continue to agonize over the continuing consequences. O'Nan's narrative voice is graceful, meditative, and filled with a tension that underscores elements of the truly mournful. The three ghosts act as a chorus to explore the minds of the tragedy's survivors, including the police officer who is at least partly responsible. At turns humorous, forgiving, childish, and rude, they are at the mercy of whichever hometown resident happens to be concentrating on them at any given time, so that the spirits are forced to "beam in" on various neighbors. Each of these characters tells his own story, allowing O'Nan to smoothly switch vistas and provide a vivid panorama of emotion and understanding.
The Night Country is as much about being haunted by guilt, doubt, and responsibility as it is about being plagued by ghosts. Stewart O'Nan has not only given us a masterpiece of chilling poignancy; he's also written one of the most engaging, human, and heartfelt novels of the year. Tom Piccirilli
From the Publisher
"I think that if you haven't read Stewart O'Nan . . . you have some catching up to do."—Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly"With one foot in the genre of horror-supernatural and the other in literary fiction, this book defies classification." —Brian Richard Boylan, San Francisco Chronicle"Chilling...By juxtaposing the angst of teenage years with the hoarier dread of middle age, O'Nan has put his finger on how frightening and swift is the hand of fate." —John Freeman, Minneapolis Star Tribune"Stewart O'Nan is a literary ventriloquist. Each of his novels is is so different that he seems capable of doing anything he chooses." —Dan Cryer, NewsdayThe New York Times
So many writers and filmmakers have used suburbia as a condescending shorthand for banality and stupidity that it's a pleasure to read a novel that understands both the freedom that suburban life, with cars and hangouts providing mobility and refuge, offers to teenagers, and the way they rail against the constrictions of it. O'Nan's descriptions of this Connecticut town at night, after the strip malls and fast-food places have shut down, capture suburbia as the haunting grounds of teenagers and spooks, both of whom do their roaming after dark. — Charles TaylorThe New Yorker
Why is the Hudson Valley haunted?” Judith Richardson asks in Possessions, a study of “the history and uses of haunting” upstate. Richardson reviews the area’s bloody rebellions and wandering ghost sailors, drawing on county archives, travelogues, letters, and the usual literary sources. She finds that the valley’s ghostly legacy derives, in part, from a fraught history of land ownership, the influence of Dutch and German folklore, and a naturally ominous landscape—as well as from entrepreneurs in the tourism industry. Richardson herself seems a little susceptible to the atmosphere that spooked Ichabod Crane. The “mountains loom and brood,” she writes, and she seeks to explain “how hauntings intersect with cultural history, public memory, economics, and land issues.”The teen-age ghosts in Stewart O’Nan’s new novel, The Night Country, also profit from native superstition. “This is still a new England, garden-green, veined with black rivers and massacres,” one of them says. The narrators were killed in a Halloween car accident, and, a year later, skittish townspeople are easy marks for their amusement. The dead are bent on revenge, which they get, of course, in an apotheosis of middle-of-the-night adolescent car rides through dark landscapes.
In Sara Gran’s Come Closer, the haunting starts in the office of a young architect, Amanda, who ignores early signs of otherworldly intervention, such as a mysterious tapping in her apartment and the delivery of a book, “Demon Possession Past and Present.” But soon she is witnessing old murders and, alas, committing new ones. Amanda’s detached and witty narration helps us believe, as she says, that “what we think is impossible happens all the time.” -- (Lauren Porcaro)