THE GLISTER
John Burnside
Doubleday/Nan A Talese
2008

This is not horror of the Stephen King variety (though i have nothing against SK)....rather it is cerebral....almost to a fault..meaning one can get lost in the atmosphere, both of the writing itself, and the setting of the story....to the point that one forgets that not much is actually happening,,,,that being said.

An abandoned chemical plant still awash in toxins...becomes the refuge of disaffected youth in the town that once depended on it..the town itself dying from civic apathy, cultural decline..the vestiges of corporate greed...severe ennui...and various odd cancers

Every year or so a boy from the local school has gone missing in the local Poisoned Woods. The local policeman, aware of the fact that these have actually been deaths..ritual killings......is also aware of the means by which they have been covered up...and suffers the usual pangs of guilt.A group of local youth decides to take matters into their own hands...or at least bring someone to Justice....with disastrous results..after a particularly violent bit of Avenging, one of the boys, Leonard, teams up with a fellow denizen of The Bad Place...and all hell proceeds to break loose in ways brutal, pathetic, and Biblical..ritual killing and an Infernal Machine.complete the steps to Oblivion

Imagine being a witness to your own death? Imagine that you are but one in a chain? Imagine being aware of these facts at the one moment when it is too late for that awareness to matter?

this was one of the best books i have read in a long while
5 Stars

*this is a review of an ARC* ( )

I thought this book would be a higher brow thriller-mystery type read, and it wasn't. It was more a surreal coming of age story, but I thought the characters were not interesting. I did not understand the plot, though it was easy to follow. The author was very descriptive and visual which I did like, but overall, not a good read. ( )

Donnie Darko meets Twin Peaks. ( )

Unlike novels that create a world and then reflect it through the interior monologue of one or more characters, The Glister seems to be all interior voice and no reality. The terror of childhood is ever-present, even as our protagonist Leonard speaks with the voice of someone at least twice his age. Leonard's interior world is a deliciously wicked place to be - his observations razor-sharp, his motives decidedly unpure - yet he is not evil or even all that deviant. Leonard is a teenager navigating a literally poisoned world; poisoned by the plant since closed that chemically contaminated the town and the surrounding woods. And now boys are being murdered, stolen from their homes and turning up dead in horrifying corporeal displays. As Leonard winds his way toward an equally grim end, we are hard-pressed to determine what is real and what exists in the boy's head, refracted through the toxins of terror and distrust.

The book's cover describes this work as "terrifying" - I didn't find it so much terrifying in the traditional adult sense. What it does well is encapsulate the fear that children spend so much time trying to ignore. They are told by adults not to talk to strangers, for example, but they are usually not told why in an effort not to frighten them. But what could be more frightening than not knowing what you are supposed to be frightened of? The few adult characters in the book are not as thoroughly examined, but all are broken, shattered people. No one escapes whole - there is no hope here, just despair and decay. The story does not wrap up nicely; there are no easy answers, no definitive resolutions. I recommend it with reservations - a mystery with a toxic cloud at its center. ( )

The Glister is more the story of a town than it is of any one person. Innertown has been decimated by its chemical plant. With the demise of the once successful chemical plant, the town seems to deteriorate and fall in on itself. The plant leaves behind a town populated with ineffectual adults unable to recover from chemical induced ailments or trapped with the grief of losing loved ones and a generation of disaffected children who haunt the abandoned and disintegrating chemical plant property in search of meaning or maybe just a way out of their dismal futures. While the adults seem to be caught up in their own lowgrade misfortune, young boys are disappearing. Instead of seeing this for the problem that it is, all choose to believe that the young teenage boys have simply found a way to escape their fates in Innertown.

I can't tell you much more, except that there's quite a bit of violence, a few teenagers that are actually even h-rnier than you would expect of teenagers, and a good deal of bad language. And this wouldn't have bothered me if it had all added up to something in the end. Instead the book just seems to trail off in yet one more mystery that doesn't seem to make any sense. As it so happens, so much of this book would be promising if only it had all come to something.

If there is indeed a main character for this book, it is Leonard, a teenage boy whose father is dying and whose mother has walked out on them. Leonard's narration crackles and pops with teenage cynicism and wit. He's a good character with a unique and consistent voice. And the atmosphere. The atmosphere in the book is stunning. Burnside manages to create an impression in the reader that Innertown is a place where the sun never shines, where the town's misfortunes cover it like blanket. Even though there are scenes where the sun is actually shining, one can't shake the feeling that this is a place where it is perpetually overcast, and no light shines in. All these things kept me reading in hopes of a fascinating resolution despite my intense dislike of Leonard's freakishly h-rny girlfriend and the various and sundry gratuitous things you would find in an R-rated movie. As you may have guessed, I was ultimately disappointed. The end just doesn't quite come together satisfactorily. It's a little like being led into a maze by someone who knows where they're going and being left halfway through to find your own way out. While I can handle an ambiguous ending, The Glister ultimately leaves too many questions unanswered without so much as a clue to lead its readers to any real resolution. ( )