The bizarre tone of this book hits you early. The queer dedication is followed by an even stranger line about an angry god cursing his own garden. It’s a heretofore unstated twist on Genesis and reminds us that this mythical place of bucolic beauty also housed a devious snake.
Wilhelmina Greene is one of those harsh protagonists. She’s a prickly, hard-as-nails adolescent, quick to anger and slow to cool. She stands up to bullies, seems to yearn for violence and can probably dish it out as much as she takes it. Her rage allows her to bond only to those who share traumatic damage. There’s nothing tender about her; she’s Wolverine without the adamantine claws. You don’t hate her but you don’t want to be around her when she starts swinging.
Her bitterness over her mother’s unsolved disappearance won’t allow her to rest. So she spies on the neighbors, takes unauthorized photographs and harasses the disinterested police officers who have filed her mother’s disappearance as parental desertion.
All this could be dismissed as one adolescent’s refusal to accept parental loss. But the next chapter reveals that there’s something sinister brewing.
The Garden of Adam, a religious sect, seems initially harmless. But the preacher’s words about animal sacrifice make you queasy; Wil’s photo of his twisting a rabbit’s neck takes on ominous connotations. The preacher’s son Elwood Clarke trembles before his father’s fundamentalist, Old Testament fervor and his mother’s social iciness. Elwood is a gentle sort with a love for lepidoptery and the collection of dead things pinned to boards to prove it. His inner language is a mixture of entomological terms, startling poetic imagery and a dark yearning to see things broken. Is he a helpless fawn to his abusive father’s demands or a chip off the old block? Or is he something else?
The opening chapters smack you sideways as you are caught in the whirlwind turmoil of its characters. Emotions clang, clash and break as they attempt to negotiate sex, infatuation, betrayal, misery and pain. All this set in a winter of lethal winds, snow and ice, seasons that regularly kill animals as surely as hunters do. It’s eerie fodder, a mystery tangled up with ruin, decrepitude and a forest that creeps ever closer to an aging hotel.
Wilhelmina Greene is one of those harsh protagonists. She’s a prickly, hard-as-nails adolescent, quick to anger and slow to cool. She stands up to bullies, seems to yearn for violence and can probably dish it out as much as she takes it. Her rage allows her to bond only to those who share traumatic damage. There’s nothing tender about her; she’s Wolverine without the adamantine claws. You don’t hate her but you don’t want to be around her when she starts swinging.
Her bitterness over her mother’s unsolved disappearance won’t allow her to rest. So she spies on the neighbors, takes unauthorized photographs and harasses the disinterested police officers who have filed her mother’s disappearance as parental desertion.
All this could be dismissed as one adolescent’s refusal to accept parental loss. But the next chapter reveals that there’s something sinister brewing.
The Garden of Adam, a religious sect, seems initially harmless. But the preacher’s words about animal sacrifice make you queasy; Wil’s photo of his twisting a rabbit’s neck takes on ominous connotations. The preacher’s son Elwood Clarke trembles before his father’s fundamentalist, Old Testament fervor and his mother’s social iciness. Elwood is a gentle sort with a love for lepidoptery and the collection of dead things pinned to boards to prove it. His inner language is a mixture of entomological terms, startling poetic imagery and a dark yearning to see things broken. Is he a helpless fawn to his abusive father’s demands or a chip off the old block? Or is he something else?
The opening chapters smack you sideways as you are caught in the whirlwind turmoil of its characters. Emotions clang, clash and break as they attempt to negotiate sex, infatuation, betrayal, misery and pain. All this set in a winter of lethal winds, snow and ice, seasons that regularly kill animals as surely as hunters do. It’s eerie fodder, a mystery tangled up with ruin, decrepitude and a forest that creeps ever closer to an aging hotel.