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Overview
Acclaimed author John Burnside delivers a profound, page-turning novel about innocence, evil, morality, and the dark corners of the human psyche.
Mysterious illnesses affect the inhabitants of the post-industrial village of Innertown, and a pervasive sense of malaise hangs everywhere. So when teenage boys disappear into the poisoned woods surrounding the village’s abandoned chemical plant, no one notices, or if they do, they don’t say a thing. Not even the town’s only cop, whose leads have long since died. To one boy, however, the chemical plant is beautiful, and it is there he will enact a plan to change the fate of the children of Innertown. To do so he will have to confront the blinding reality that burns in the chemical plant’s cavernous center.
Synopsis
Acclaimed author John Burnside delivers a profound, page-turning novel about innocence, evil, morality, and the dark corners of the human psyche.
Mysterious illnesses affect the inhabitants of the post-industrial village of Innertown, and a pervasive sense of malaise hangs everywhere. So when teenage boys disappear into the poisoned woods surrounding the village’s abandoned chemical plant, no one notices, or if they do, they don’t say a thing. Not even the town’s only cop, whose leads have long since died. To one boy, however, the chemical plant is beautiful, and it is there he will enact a plan to change the fate of the children of Innertown. To do so he will have to confront the blinding reality that burns in the chemical plant’s cavernous center.
The New York Times - Terrence Rafferty
What is most beautiful, and most frightening, about the novel itself is its melancholy awareness of how desperate our acts of devotion can be in places like this toxic town, how terrible the things we can learn to love…The emotion this brilliant and disturbing novel leaves you with is like the spooked feeling Leonard experiences at the sudden intimation of "some essence, some hidden principle" in the world: "It takes your breath away, but you don't know if that comes from awe or terror." The Glister is that kind of story. It's terrifying, and it feels like a gift.
Editorials
Terrence Rafferty
What is most beautiful, and most frightening, about the novel itself is its melancholy awareness of how desperate our acts of devotion can be in places like this toxic town, how terrible the things we can learn to love…The emotion this brilliant and disturbing novel leaves you with is like the spooked feeling Leonard experiences at the sudden intimation of "some essence, some hidden principle" in the world: "It takes your breath away, but you don't know if that comes from awe or terror." The Glister is that kind of story. It's terrifying, and it feels like a gift.—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
In his bleakly beautiful seventh novel, Scottish author Burnside (The Devil's Footprint) delivers a cautionary tale illustrating that greed and an indifference to suffering are the real horrors of modern life. In recent years, five teenage boys have disappeared from the coastal village of Innertown, where an abandoned chemical plant deep in the forest is slowly poisoning its rapidly declining population. The official line is that the missing boys are seeking a better life away from the town whose "sole business is slow decay." A 15-year-old lad, who's found solace in books and foreign films that he can barely understand, is determined to find out what happened to his friends and why the town's lone cop spends so much time in those tarnished woods. Burnside expertly details an apocalyptic landscape where the "expectation of failure" is rampant. While the ending feels hurried, Burnside's flawless prose explores how defeat is only a state of mind. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Library Journal
Burnside (The Devil's Footprints) sets his new novel in Innertown, an economically depressed town still reeling from the closure of the chemical plant years earlier-a chemical plant that leaked contaminants into the water and soil and caused strange mutations in animals and people. Innertown's problems don't end there, however: nearly every year, another boy disappears, never found. Policeman John Morrison discovered the first boy's body but covered it up. Now he's stuck pretending each subsequent disappearance is merely a runaway boy and not a case of murder. Meanwhile, a young boy named Leonard wonders if he might be the next victim. Burnside's story is haunting and twisted but, ultimately, incomprehensible and unresolved. He evokes a mood of an eerie otherworld and lets plot details swirl like fog around readers. Not a usual murder mystery, this is suitable (but not essential) for large public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ11/1/08.]
—Laurel Bliss