Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone

I picked this book because the title caught my eye, and the blurb on the cover said “Shirley Jackson meets The X-Files in this riveting novel of supernatural horror.” From this, I was expecting some dark supernatural events with an investigatorial framework. What I got was something else entirely.

Now, I freely admit, horror isn’t my go-to genre. I like my zombies funny and gore kept to a minimum, but I was willing to give it a chance. Over the course of the book, the 5 narrators go from one horror to another in this small German village. Murders, arson, incest, and rape follow one after the other. They relate these events n a fairly flat unemotional way. I’m not sure if the intent was for the narrators to be adults recalling the events of their childhood, or if the characters are just little shits.

While the citizens attribute many of these to supernatural influence, it’s generally the children either are either causing, witnessing, or suffering the many evils of the book with no real suggestion that the people’s superstition is real. This is just a bunch of generally immoral/amoral people engaging in a series of horrific acts to the extent that by the middle of the book any shock value has worn off. By the end of the book, I had a hard time remembering who did what to who, but then I didn’t really care either.

As for the ending itself, there wasn’t really any resolution. The surviving characters just continued on. Some moved away, some didn’t. I suppose it’s a very realistic ending, as far as it goes, but it wasn’t very satisfying.