Far as the Curse is Found: Two Novels Dealing with Death

This seems like an odd time of year to talk about death, but the joy of the Christmas season wouldn’t be joyful at all if that baby did not represent God’s solution to our biggest problem.  Isaac Watts recognized that, in one of my most favorite Christmas hymns: No more let sin and sorrow reign, nor thorns infest the ground.  He comes to make his blessings flow, far as the curse is found.  There’s nothing Christmas-y about these two novels, except that they address the same basic problem:

Nightmare City, by Andrew Klavan.  Thomas Nelson, 2013, 306 pages, including discussion guide.  Age/interest level: 12-up.

“Tom was in heaven when the phone rang.”  Not walking on golden streets or strumming a harp, but there’s something heavenly about it: a peaceful place with grassy lawns and splashing fountains, surrounded by classical, temple-like structures.  On closer inspection, though, the inhabitants don’t look especially happy.  If he had to describe them, he’d say they looked anxious or fretful.

It’s all a dream of course.  The trouble is, after waking up to the ring tone on his phone, Tom still appears to be dreaming.  His southern California home is wrapped in fog, his mom is nowhere to be found, and the world outside is eerily silent.  And in the basement he hears a very familiar voice, but there’s no one there.  The TV seems to be turning on by itself, and the images it shows grow progressively more disturbing.  This being an Andrew Klavan novel, we expect the tension to start high and stay there for a good long time, but Nightmare City is strikingly different from his usual nonstop action mode.  He describes it as a combination adventure and ghost story, but I would call it suspense in the best Hitchcockian mode. 

Tom is a reporter for his high school newspaper, with the instincts of an investigator and an uncompromising zeal for the truth.  His recent story on drug use among the school’s championship football team has raised hackles, to say the least—in fact, it’s made him a pariah.  One small compensation is the unexpected favor of Marie Cameron, his hopeless crush since second grade, who now expresses admiration for his bold stand.  But of course, things may not be what they seem.  And things may not seem what they are.  And Tom soon realizes he is in very serious danger . . .

I can’t say much more without giving away crucial plot elements, but I’ll just say that death is a rather large element; of all Klavan’s YA novels, this is the most metaphysical, as well as the most theological.  Readers new to Klavan may want to start with Crazy Dangerous or If We Survive, which are straightforward, action-packed adventure novels.  Nightmare City takes us a little deeper, to eternal consequences of life and death, winning and losing, truth and the many forms of falsehood.  “Despair is not an option,” and the bigger game is always to win.

• Worldview/moral value: 5
• Literary value: 4

Everything Breaks, by Vicki Grove.  G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2013, 242 pages.  Age/interest level: 13-up.

Tucker Graysten did the first serious drinking of his life the night of the bonfire.  He’d started the evening as designated driver of his friend Trey’s red Mustang, feeling as “simple and happy as an animal, maybe a wolf or coyote, moving swiftly across the warm earth under the cool October sky.”  But then they stopped for beer, and Tucker’s carefree mood prompted him to have three of them .  His stomach didn’t like it one bit.  While Tucker was heaving in a ditch, he waved on his three friends, saying he’d catch up with them later.  But he didn’t–because Trey, Steve, and Zero, all precious and individual and irreplaceable, crashed to their deaths when the Mustang plunged off the final switchback of the old mine road.  Now ridden with survivor’s guilt, Tucker can’t shake the feeling that he’ll follow them before long, especially since meeting that dog—that friendly, tail-thumping mutt who appears without warning, drooling eagerly from all three heads.

This story could easily deteriorate into a drink-and-drive cautionary tale or an obsessively morbid message novel, but is saved by the author’s care of and affection for her characters.  Tucker lives with his stepmother Janet and her father Bud, an octogenarian who might have been getting ready to take that last journey himself, if he weren’t so stubborn.  Such a character is an unlikely instrument to push Tucker back into the habit of living, but Bud is assisted by a quirky, pink-haired female hitch-hiker he and Tucker pick up on a spur-of-the-moment road trip.  The girl stretches Tucker’s patience to the breaking point, notably in her demand for the antique coin, an “obolus,” that his English teacher gave him after the accident.  Why does the girl insist it’s hers?

The story’s mythic dimension draws from several traditions, including Christian, but leans more toward the Greek view of death as the undiscovered country or “last frontier.”  Tucker spends most of the novel in the anteroom of Hades, trying to decide if the broken pieces of his life are worth picking up.  Young readers who are looking for slam-bang action may be disappointed, but those who read to expand their understanding, say, of life and its most perplexing paradox, will find a lot of food for thought here.  It’s an example of what novels are for: the use of the particular to explore the universal.  As a bonus for Christian readers, there’s no bad language or gratuitous “situations.”

• Worldview/moral value: 4
• Literary value: 5

For more Andrew Klavan, see our interview and our read-along of The Last Thing I Remember.  We’ve delved into the subject of death in children’s books before, notably here and here, and in our review of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars.