A woman kills herself and her sons, but not her daughter; did she believe the boys were fathered by the devil? Her brother was killed by the narrator, who was also her former lover; was he the father of her daughter? The daughter runs away, or is she abducted? Another woman is killed by a car driven by the town drunk, one of those who has been persecuting her family for years. Two men are abducted ... but only one is tortured and killed. Has this small seaside town been cursed by the devil whose snow-bound footprints crossed it from the sea to the countryside a hundred years ago?
Beautifully written, with a wonderful hook at the 3% mark: "Even though Moira didn't know it, even though nobody knew it but me, I was the one who had killed her brother, when I was thirteen and he was fifteen, killed him and left him to rot in the old limeroom on a weekday afternoon, when we should have been in school." (The Evening Herald; p 10). I defy you not to read on after that.
It continues, drip-feeding the avid reader with other nuggets. As the narrator says: "I was told this story as a child; or rather, I overheard it. I caught a fragment here, a glimpse there, and I put it together piecemeal, adding details and amendments of my own, making it richer, making it bright and mythical and sure. Making it up." (The Devil's Footprints; p 5) The construction is nearly perfect.
Selected quotes:
The page numbers refer to the Ulverscroft Large Print Edition of 2008
- "A forceful and crudely handsome boy, manufactured ... on one of God's off-days." (The Evening Herald; p 9)
- "Family is a self-perpetuating mechanism, like a virus." (The Evening Herald; p 20)
- "Out here the stars have always felt closer, the wind a participant in my daily life, giving me the dreams I dream, following me into the house on a blustery day like a familiar dog, snuffling around the hall for a minute or two before vanishing into the kitchen." (The Evening Herald; p 34)
- "His tongue flickered between his lips in soft appraisal." (The Evening Herald; p 60)
- "A forlorn child in a narrow seaside town, a boy among grim-faced adults whose only life was church and work." (The Evening Herald; p 79)
- "She didn't want to live ... like some stain fading slowly on the air" (Le Reniement De Saint Pierre; p 135) This reminded me of The Great Divorce by C S Lewis in which he describes ghosts as "man-shaped stains on the brightness of that air.”
- "Just a man; which was to say: a set of wants, a collection of impulses, a bundle of needs, only half of them visible to his own sorry gaze." (The Dark End of the Fair; p 239)
John Burnside also wrote (reviewed in this blog):
- Glister about another boy in a seaside town damned and doomed by the ruins of the industrial manufacturing plant.
April 2024; 311 pages
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