"Glister" by John Burnside

 The houses of Innertown cluster around the abandoned chemical plant. Many of the people living there are sick and dying, all of them have abandoned hope. A teenaged boy disappears. The policeman knows what happened but he helps the town's richest resident cover it up. Since then another five lads have vanished, one after another.

Leonard thinks he will be the next. Meantime he cares for his dying father, reads voraciously at the local library, fucks his girlfriend, Elspeth, drinks psychedelic tea with the Moth Man, and gets rather too involved with Jimmy's gang.

Chapters of the stunning story are narrated in the third person by the policeman, his wife, his ex-employer, and Elspeth, but the bulk of the story, including a prologue which seems to be written after his death, is narrated in the first-person by Leonard. The story is strange, haunted by themes of avenging angels and guilt and loss and the desolation of decay. The narrating characters are beautifully described: the guilt-ridden policeman ("that dim, self-pitying doormat of a man";  1: The Book of Job: Connections) and his alcoholic wife, the cynical and manipulative boss, needy but loving Elspeth. Jimmy's gang is wonderfully feral, following only the rules of the pack (and provides a hilarious moment when Mickey gets chloroform and chlorophyll confused). Mythic roles are taken by John the Librarian and the Moth Man (a character first met at the 50% turning point and presumably named after the strange folklore supernatural creature from West Virginia). And, central to all, is the doomed Leonard, intelligent and caring, but accepting of his fate. I just wish he'd had the chance to finish reading Proust.

Selected quotes:

• "It's the story that's unreliable, not the narrator - and  I don't believe there's such a thing as 'the author' at all." (Life Is Bigger)
• "A secret, enclosed space where a boy with more imagination than friends might sit out late, playing at wilderness." (1: The Book of Job: Homeland)
• "Compared to a number puzzle, or a complicated jigsaw, people were like those dodgem cars at the fair, going round in circles and bumping into one another noisily to no real purpose." (1: The Book of Job: Connections)
• "When you ignore what people feel and want, when you see them as objects in the fullest sense of the word, they become the most interesting pieces in the most compelling and elegant puzzle of all." (1: The Book of Job: Connections)
• "Nothing in the world is as contagious as the expectation of failure."  (1: The Book of Job: Connections)
•  "The great thing about public money is that it doesn't stay public for long."  (1: The Book of Job: Connections)
• "Mistakes don't happen in a single, decisive moment, they unfold slowly through a lifetime."  (1: The Book of Job: Morrison)
• "Smith didn't ask for favours, he offered them. Nevertheless, it took nothing more than a smile and a friendly handshake for Morrison to know that his soul was being claimed."    (1: The Book of Job: Morrison)
• "He had that air of calculated affability that let you know he didn't give a fuck about you or anybody else."   (1: The Book of Job: Morrison)
• "Being insulted by a navvy in a suit was the least of his problems."  (1: The Book of Job: Morrison)
• "The dead go away into their solitude, but the young dead stay with us, they colour our dreams, they make us wonder about ourselves, that we should be so unlucky, or clumsy, or so downright ordinary as to carry on without them."   (1: The Book of Job: Morrison)
• "Lying on the bed in a tight sleeve of pills and vodka."   (1: The Book of Job: Alice)
• "You find that with teachers: as soon as they have a run-in with somebody, they go straight to the weakest cub in the pack.It's how they restore order."   (1: The Book of Job: Et In Arcadia)
• "That's how the world works. The bad people win and the rest pretend they haven't noticed what's going on, to save face." (1: The Book of Job: Et In Arcadia)
• "Even in the most law-abiding place, what makes the difference is that one man is capable of killing and another isn't." (1: The Book of Job: Et In Arcadia)
• "I think, on the whole, that romance is something that should be saved for later, when you're old enough to deal with it. In the meantime, there's fucking. Kids are better at that than romance and all that difficult shit." (1: The Book of Job: Et In Arcadia)
• "trapped in the slow run of time like a swimmer caught in a current that's too strong to resist." (1: The Book of Job: Et In Arcadia)
• "He's borrowing moments, borrowing looks and smiles and the odd word from people who are luckier than he is." (1: The Book of Job: Rivers)
• "He had a sad look now, a look that took all the disappointments he'd ever had in a whole lifetime and brought them together in one final foregone conclusion." (2: The Fire Sermon: Undoing)
• "like when God sent the angel to kill all the eldest sons of the Egyptians, but spared the Israelite kids. You had to give it to those Israelites, they were hard bastards.  ... Some fucking angel was going to be running through the town killing children, and they just lay down and had a good night's sleep, without a second thought. Me, I'd have felt a bit bad about some of those Egyptian kids. I'd have wanted to tip somebody off." (2: The Fire Sermon: Leonard)
• "Now, faces loom up at her out of the floor, or they come leering out from a wall, dead faces, but mocking, mocking and desperate at once ... Worse still, though, are the noises in her head - not voices, never voices any more, just a noise like furniture being moved, wooden table legs dragging across a floor, or saucepan lids falling and  clattering on tiles, or maybe the sound of piano wires resonating in the dark, where someone is rocking the frame back and forth." (2: The Fire Sermon: Dreaming)
• "That's the twist about hell ... the fact that, in hell, it's not the guilty who suffer, it's the innocent. That's what makes it hell. Some random principle wanders through the world, choosing people for no good reason and plunging them into hell. Grief for a child. Horrifying sickness. Noises and faces coming from nowhere ..." (2: The Fire Sermon: Dreaming)
• "This patient, self-contained man is one of life's watchers ... not possessed of animosity or any other emotion, simply someone who enjoys having power over others." (2: The Fire Sermon: Morrison)
• "People like to look at sadness because it isn't pain, and because it echoes something in themselves."  (2: The Fire Sermon: Morrison)
• "The policeman's offence is too grievous to go unpunished, the most extreme form of an offence the whole town has been mired in for decades: the sin of omission, the act of averting our gaze ... the sin of not wanting to know; the sin of knowing everything and not doing anything about it. ... I'm not saying we should try to help the people in Somalia, or stop the devastation of the rainforest, it's just that we don't feel anything at all other than a mild sense of discomfort or embarrassment when we see the broken trees and the mudslides, or the child amputees in the field hospitals - and it's unforgivable that we go on with our lives when these things are happening somewhere." (2: The Fire Sermon: Heaven)

This is what urban fantasy ought to be: not fairies in the subway but gritty, post-industrial decay with a visit from the angel of death. 

March 2024; 258 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Also by John Burnside and reviewed in this blog:

• The Devil's Footprints