A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain

Poverty or the Devil

A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain: A Novel by Adrianne Harun (Penguin Books, $16).

It’s hard to know what the greater evil is in Adrianne Harun’s debut novel: poverty, which sucks the life from a logging town and leaves meth-dealing sociopaths in charge, or the Devil with a capital “d,” the sort of the evil behind supernatural doings and possibly a string of murders of young women along a highway.

And it doesn’t really matter, because the result is the same: people addicted, out of work, or just left watching the inevitable, sickening result of both, which include a pair of twin boys left unfed and uncared for because their addict mother can’t cope.

Told by the teenaged Leo, who recounts the events show more and actions of his circle of friends, Harun seems driven to a good-versus-evil paradigm that doesn’t include much in the way of subtlety or gradation. One of the characters urges Bryan, Leo’s best friend and without a doubt the bright and shining hope of the group of friends, to kill the murderously evil meth kingpin Gerald Flacker (who is truly a fully-drawn villain if ever there was one, lacking only the supernatural origins of Old Scratch himself) in order to save the twin boys—by depriving their mother of meth.

But that neatly skips a step, which is the less-clearly-evil wrongdoing of addiction itself. Nuance isn’t part of this story.

Of course, that makes all the more sense when we realize that we’re seeing these events unfold through the eyes of teenagers, and there never was a more Manichean bunch than young adults. Harun has drawn them fully and well, with Bryan representing the best they’ve got to offer—though Leo will certainly be the one to write it all down.

And, being part-Native, Leo is also our door into the mystical; he is the keeper of the folktales handed down by his dying Uncle Lud—a name with strong mythological connotations among the Welsh—and the one who seems to understand that something larger than poverty, lack of opportunities and easy access to meth is at work on the fabric of the town.

And then there is a serial killer to contend with, not to mention the tensions between Native Americans and whites in this mountainous British Columbia locale.

With a sweeping cast of characters, A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain is a stunning example of a complex novel for adults that features teenagers as the main characters. Don’t let the supernatural elements put you off; there’s plenty of evil to go around. show less

There are novels in which place is a character unto itself, when tone and setting are so artfully evoked that the reader is practically standing alongside the story's protagonists. A skilled writer transports readers by drawing on the generalities with we're all familiar--nature, in its grandeur or grotesqueness; city life, with its commotion and loneliness--and then situating them within the unique context--the setting--of the story. Philip Meyer's American Rust comes to mind, as do Cormac McCarthy's novels. With a touch less darkness and a pinch of magic, we may add add Adrianne Harun's A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain (February 2014, Penguin) to that list.

The story is set in an isolated town in British Columbia. As with many show more small towns, this one is less an idyllic hamlet than it is a hopeless blip in the wilderness. Harun masterfully conveys the desolation with references to an apparently hostile natural world and the rot characteristic at humanity's attempts to defy it. Gerald Flacker, the local meth dealer, and his cronies, the Nagle brothers, treat the town as their personal fiefdom. Harun immediately establishes a sense of creeping dread: The town is adjacent to Highway 16, the so-called "Highway of Tears," along which women, mostly aboriginal, have been disappearing for decades. In short, this is not a friendly place.

That's not to say that Leo Kreutzer, on whom Harun focuses, is without friends. Poor and marginalized--Leo is half-white, half-aboriginal--Leo and his friends cling all the more fiercely to one another. Family, too, is important: Leo's mother takes in her brother-in-law, the dying Uncle Lud, despite her husband's absence. Brother and sister Bryan and Ursie, orphans, maintain a semblance of family in their parents' decaying house. Tessa, on whom Leo has a crush, and Jackie, who works at the logging camp, round out the crew.

What plot there is unravels messily and without tidy resolution, which, in that respect, mirrors real life. The novel opens with the group engaged in a favorite pastime, as they linger at the town dump, shooting rats and birds. Jackie introduces her friends to Hana Swann, a charismatic itinerant who also works in the logging camp's cafeteria. Swann, in contrast to Leo and his friends, is extremely pale, and her presence at once alluring and repellent: She shoots a marmot (a protected species). She challenges the friends to do something about Flacker, a notion that possesses Bryan and sets the plot in motion. Upon learning of Swann, Uncle Lud insists that Leo has met the "Snow Queen," a troublesome character known to Leo from the many folktales his uncle unspools. Readers may wonder at Swann's subsequent disappearance from the story, but she is like the "devil's hopscotch" to which Harun refers, a stray stone thrown in that scatters players in a variety of unexpected directions.

A Man Came Out of the Door in the Mountain is really a story about stories, the ways in which we construct meaning by imposing a narrative on events. Indeed, much of the book consists of Leo's recollections after the fact, but related as present tense, a method that keeps the reader on his (and Harun's) hook. Leo receives e-mails from the instructor of the correspondence physics class his mother forced him into. The notes are strangely personal, as Leo's instructor explains that she attempted to study poetry at the graduate level but failed, and later turned to, and excelled at, science. Still, she quotes Leonard Cohen to Leo even as she analyzes his personality (with little to go on, as he is disengaged and sends her just one equation in which he proposes how one might quantify love). Science improves our lives, it provides us answers, but it can't generate meaning. Uncle Lud knows this intuitively, spinning folktales about a devil in which he doesn't really believe. Uncle Lud believes in stories, Leo tells readers.

Of course, we readers believe in stories, too, or we wouldn't spend so many hours shushing our loved ones while we turn page after page. We may not take to heart the superstitious Catholic-aboriginal mishmash Leo's mom practices, but we understand her reasons. Like Uncle Lud, we know that there are very real devils in the world, and that sometimes only the context of fiction can make them real. A haunting novel with folkloric and magical realist elements, A Man Came Out of the Door in the Mountain is a debut not to be missed. show less

A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain by Adrianne Harun is a gratifying, atmospheric debut novel that is highly recommended.

"That wasn’t the first summer girls went missing off the Highway, not the first time a family lost its dearest member to untraceable evil, but it was the first time someone I loved was among that number—spirited away, it seemed, although I knew better." Leo Kreutzer is the narrator in Harun's novel about five friends, all seventeen, who meet the devil in earthly forms during one hot dry summer in a small British Columbia logging town. Girls have been going missing along the highway for years but during this summer the five friends may actually meet the prince of lies and his handmaiden.

"The five of show more us—Jackie; Bryan; Bryan’s sister, Ursie; Tessa; and me—had been oddball friends since swaddling days, and as soon as we started school, that friendship had been cemented. Part Kitselas, part Haisla, part Polish and German, Ursie, Bryan, and me fit with neither the white nor the Indian kids, who spurned us in different ways. But Jackie, who held her whole generous nation in her blood, adopted us..." (Location 106)

While the five friends try to find a diversion from their bleak lives by shooting at the town dump together, they know their lives are rife with prejudice, poverty, drug abuse, and alcoholism. They were hardly prepared for the mysterious arrival in town and in their lives of Hana Swann and Kevin Seven, and the evil they set into motion. Although it could be easily argued that evil was already in their town with the violent drug dealing Nagel brothers and Gerald Flacker.

"Revenge, resentment—a kind of low-level heat that burned constantly within us, tamped down by the silence we knew would be our only protection until we couldn’t stand it anymore and the flames burst through. We had seen that happen to others and wondered when it would happen to us, break us wide open so that we would be set free or singed beyond repair. Jackie would be the first, the rest of us were sure. She was tough and stoic, but beneath it, her sense of fairness was acute, and her pain at every injustice became harder and harder to hide."(Location 156)

While telling the story of that fateful summer, Leo also shares folk stories his dying uncle Jud has told him, which he has written down in notebooks. His uncle's stories are central to the plot and illustrate/illuminate the narrative, giving the action a sense of timelessness as old as evil itself. But everyone has a story, as Leo's tale unfolds we know this, only as Leo points out, "Almost everybody who shows up here has a story, usually embellished and smoothed out. That’s one big difference right off between those who arrive and those who live here. Our own stories were unedited—sprawling and unpretty—and nothing could clip and shape and redefine them as long as we stayed here." (Location 199)

We know that something bad is going to happen, as Leo foreshadows, "I guess we both must have known then that trouble was not on its way; it was already here. Although how could we have known how many forms that trouble would take?"(Location 358) And that is the crux of the question: exactly what form is the evil going to take and who is going to be harmed?

A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain is poetic and full of magic realism along with supernatural stories and a mythology of its own. All these elements intertwine and weave together to form a truly memorable debut novel. The title is taken from one of the stories told to Leo by Uncle Jud.

Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Penguin Books via Netgalley for review purposes. show less

Much like Brittany, I find myself saying - "Whoops, I did it again." I let far too much time pass in between the reading of the book and my writing of my review. NetGalley, like the good (urm, lapsed) Catholic girl I am, I hereby proffer my knuckles to you for a swift rapping with your stiffest ruler. I received this gut-wrenchingly good book for free in exchange for my honest opinion, and I sat on the review. Shame on me. My sincere apologies.

This book was stunning. I requested it a few months back after reading fellow GoodReader karen's review. I was not disappointed in the least. It was a gritty yet tender story of a marginalized group of teenagers living on the edge of society, trying to make sense of a series of frightening, show more racially-motivated unsolved abductions. (Coincidentally, this work of fiction was based on the still unsolved and prosecuted murders of aboriginal girls and women along the Highway of Tears in British Columbia.) The resulting story doesn't focus solely on these particular crimes, but the abductions occurring in the background of the plot serve to create a palpible atmosphere of tension, mistrust and desperation. The unraveling of these character's lives unfolds before the reader like a slow motion Rube Goldberg machine... that breaks your heart. All of the characters were drawn with such compassion and tenderness; the glaring poverty of their everyday existence is almost unimaginable. I say almost - because Harun is such an adept author that she pulls the reader right down into the squalid middle of the characters' plight, forcing them to sweat in crowded, smokey hotel rooms where illegal poker games are being fixed, making them fidget with hunger pangs as children scavenge stolen leftovers, asking them to feel the throbbing ache of alienation of the aboriginal people of B.C. It was horribly beautiful. It is one of my new favorites.

Once again, thanks (and apologies) are extended to NetGalley. This was a reading experience that I would have sorely missed had I not discovered it on your digital shelves. show less

All the descriptions of this say it's beautiful, and I guess it is, but what it mostly is is a sensitively-written depiction of people whose lives were never going to be good but which didn't have to be this bad. It's rough going, tragic even (especially) when exciting, and the places where things don't get entirely explained are just the right places to leave empty.

I awaited this book with much excitement, despite knowing very little about what I would read. Adrianne Harun has a lovely, lyrical style of writing. Her wording is not flowery, but evokes such precise, sharp images. I found it similar to Paul Harding's style in _Enon_, how the structure of his sentences spiraled, making me dizzy in the most pleasant possible way.

_A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain_ , while inspired by the women abducted along Northern Canada's "Highway of Tears", has more to do with Good and Evil; how one can see them coming and decide how to act or be acted upon. Pulling from a mixture of myth and grim small-town reality, Harun deftly weaves her tale around the fate of five teenagers and those close to them.

Adrianne Harun has nailed it!
I live along Highway 16. Adrianne Harun has taken this "Highway of Tears" and created an amazing fantasy based on the disappearances of mostly aboriginal girls, a case that defies solving to this day. Mixing reality, myth, the plight of small logging towns in northern British Columbia, and the boredom of mixed-race youth and hopelessness of the poor, she has run with this fascinating story. Her descriptive prose, the stories told by Leo's Uncle Lud, and a man who is unknown yet known, and a mysterious young girl--is she really the Snow Woman?--all combine to make this story compelling. The devil has many faces.

The characterizations and mindsets are spot on, too often found in these small one-store towns in show more the forests of British Columbia. Youngsters must work, alcoholism is rife, and in their free time make their own entertainment, whether good or bad. A group of friends stick together, surviving the odds. Adrianne has taken on these elements and many others to give us a mythical yet not unknown reality, mixed it up and turned out full-blown a novel we can feel. Sad though these stories are, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I was mesmerized and found it hard to put the book down, not wanting to lose a single thread. Remember her name, I'm sure we will be hearing it in the future.
Review based on Advance Reading Copy (ARC) show less