The Bright Lands

Ten years ago, back when he would meet Troy here, he had always seen the First Baptist Church's steeple in his rearview mirror, watching him from back in town. Now, with the church gone, there was nothing on the horizon but the football field's tall halogen field lights. They seemed to follow him wherever he went.
Joel wondered if they might not have been the steeples of this town's true religion all along.

Have you ever watched a gymnast go through an awesome uneven bars routine and then when it came time for the dismount they just faceplanted into the mat and didn't get up? That's what this book felt like to me.

Don't get me wrong, I was having a blast... with the first 90% of this book. Basically the set up is that an out-and-proud gay guy living in NYC comes back home to his bigoted small Texan town for the first time in a decade to visit his younger brother who's a senior in high school and the quarterback for the football team. This younger brother is basically a local celebrity and the town reveres the sport to the point of being an unhealthy obsession. There is unease and tension and a foreboding sense of "something fucking weird is going on around here," right from the get-go, and I was all about it. It also was a little too good at depicting high school culture and brought up some of my own memories from that era (doubly so because the main character graduated from high school himself back in '07, same as me).

The story turns into a murder mystery that may or may not be related to a similar disappearance a decade earlier, and there are tons of satisfying twists and turns that kept pulling me in deeper. There's also strange hints of something maybe supernatural happening in the background, but there's always just enough plausible deniability that allowed the characters experiencing this weird shit to hand-waive it away in a way that didn't feel cheap.

And then there's the big reveal.

The reveal wherein the reader discovers what and where 'The Bright Lands' really are. And I just... have not been disappointed in a book like this in quite some time. Without giving anything away, it wasn't that it was too mundane or too far beyond my suspension of disbelief to accept, but rather it just felt like something that didn't even make sense within the fiction. It felt like an inconsistent tone shift that came from a completely different book. It might have benefited from leaning even harder into the supernatural elements rather than just flirting with it.

Also one of the overall messages I came away with was that if you're a closeted queer kid in a homophobic town, things actually don't get better if you manage to escape because your life just becomes materialistic and empty because gay men can't form lasting relationships? Which is absurd and demonstrably untrue. I believe there was also an attempt at a message on the importance of family, but that didn't really work either when the mother of the two brothers is largely a non-character for the majority of the book.

Still, the first, I don't know, three quarters of the book is good. If you decide to pick this one up, I recommend taking notes because between the football team, all of their girlfriends, all the parents, and the entire police department there are honest to god about 30 named characters in this book that are all plot relevant at one point or another. I committed myself to reading a good chunk of this in one day (again, I was having fun up until the end), and even then I was struggling to remember who was who. If I was just treating it as maybe a chapter or two a night, I would've gotten confused trying to remember all these names floating around.