Acclaimed author John Burnside delivers a profound, page-turning novel about innocence, evil, morality, and the dark corners of the human psyche. <...
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Jan 05, 2009
Mary
rated it: 
There are moments of recognition, when I turned a page in "The Glister" and had the sense of reading this in a book or seeing this on the big screen before. I felt that "ah ha" moment when a murder scene had elements of "Blair Witch Project" or when a pack of children went all "Lord of the Flies" in the black and poisoned forest of Innertown. I may not be a big fan of this sort of novel but "The Glister" pulled me in with the surprise of great d
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Mar 10, 2009
Sara
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John Burnside’s The Glister opens in a modern day ghost town. The chemical plant that once fused the city with life and prosperity has been closed and left to rot. Everything in the town can be described as dead and deformed. The town’s adults are apathetic, depressed and diseased. The children are violent, promiscuous, and haunted. But no one ever leaves the town, unless of course, they disappear.
This book is not a typical horror or mystery novel. It’s more of a very long dar More...
This book is not a typical horror or mystery novel. It’s more of a very long dar More...
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Dec 06, 2008
Mike
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Over the course of the first half, this felt a bit too familiar, and I kept comparing it to Glen Hirshberg's very fine The Snowman's Children--where the dread of the serial-killer plot served as mere mechanism for conveying something opaque, shadowy, oblique about the dread we feel as children, adulthood's darkness looming. Burnside tells the story via different points of view, which diffuses that dread into a more existential, Twin-Peaksy focus on a community marked by evil; the least effectiv
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Apr 01, 2009
Bj
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Billed as a horror novel, this bizarre novel goes nowhere frightening or even ... coherent. Trying to be "abstract" it succeeds only in revealing there are no ideas at the core of this "story."
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Apr 06, 2009
jen8998
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A fascinating dark fable of a city where no one actually leaves but in which young boys frequently disappear.
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Jul 26, 2011
If I hadn’t known before I started The Glister that author John Burnside was also a poet, I could likely have guessed it by the end of the first page. Throughout this very creepy novel, the language elevated it from prose to quite nearly poetry.
Initially appearing to be a novel about missing children in a post-industrial town, The Glister quickly becomes a metaphor for a dead-end life. The teenage narrator, Leonard speaks candidly about his choices, desires and decisions, and just as More...
Initially appearing to be a novel about missing children in a post-industrial town, The Glister quickly becomes a metaphor for a dead-end life. The teenage narrator, Leonard speaks candidly about his choices, desires and decisions, and just as More...
Oct 28, 2010
Clement
rated it:
A Glister of Deception
Stop. Just please, stop. You’ve deceived me enough. I believed in your every word as I read you line-to-line, blinded by your poetic lyrics. You moved me, frightened me and excited me. You made me feel emotions that I’ve never felt before while reading a book. Yet in the end, you disappointed me. As I closed your paperback facade, I felt a fool, betrayed by a gift of mankind. Betrayed by literature. While you are named The Glister, you far from dazzle.
The More...
Stop. Just please, stop. You’ve deceived me enough. I believed in your every word as I read you line-to-line, blinded by your poetic lyrics. You moved me, frightened me and excited me. You made me feel emotions that I’ve never felt before while reading a book. Yet in the end, you disappointed me. As I closed your paperback facade, I felt a fool, betrayed by a gift of mankind. Betrayed by literature. While you are named The Glister, you far from dazzle.
The More...
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Oct 21, 2010
Clara
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The Glister is a story about a once-industrial town, specializing in chemical production, known as Innertown. Now, Innertown is not a place anyone with a right mind would want to live in; the kids are violent with practically no morals, and the adults are either too sick from unknown illnesses or too tired of life to care. And not to mention, approximately every year or so, a boy disappears. Authorities turn a blind eye to this, as does the town’s only policeman, and the inhabitants are fed tran
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May 15, 2010
Angela
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A richly populated, flawlessly descriptive story, The Glister is a slow-moving but fascinating (and repeatedly hilarious) novel that tells the story of broken Innertown, a working-class area where the town's only business, a chemical plant with a dubious environmental record, has long shut down and plunged the town into darkness.
The Glister is neither a traditional horror story or mystery novel, although there's plenty of horror and mystery to it. Burnside creates a Hitchcockian atm More...
The Glister is neither a traditional horror story or mystery novel, although there's plenty of horror and mystery to it. Burnside creates a Hitchcockian atm More...
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May 13, 2009
Tracy
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This is one of those books that I want to rank on two completely different scales - one for atmosphere and one for story.
On the former, The Glister gets a fantastic score, 4 or even 5. A sort of literary horror, the whole work is laid over with a subtle, sinister edge. The nearly feral teenagers, the remains of the chemical plant poisoning not only the land but the people, physically and psychologically was done with sinister and often subtle edge and a dreamlike quality.
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On the former, The Glister gets a fantastic score, 4 or even 5. A sort of literary horror, the whole work is laid over with a subtle, sinister edge. The nearly feral teenagers, the remains of the chemical plant poisoning not only the land but the people, physically and psychologically was done with sinister and often subtle edge and a dreamlike quality.
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Dec 09, 2008
Cheryl
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The town and the people of Innertown have never been the same since George Lister’s chemical plant shut down, especially the woods. There is something evil in the woods. Every year a boy or two disappears, never to be seen or heard from again. The police won’t do anything about the disappearances as there is no sign of foul play. There are a few people who believe otherwise and they are town policeman, John Morrison in addition to Leonard and his friends. It seems that Morrison knows there is ev
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Jan 08, 2011
David
rated it: 
Glister scared me witless, and devoured me. I expected no ending would/could finish the story, and there is no way the book could put all the pieces away. The pieces are mystery, horror, coming-of-age, and environmental genres of writing. The parts are entirely absorbed by, or left buried in, the Scottish industrial landscape and the Glister - a mysterious hidden room, within hidden rooms, part of an ancient chemical plant. The spellbounding emptiness - felt from the first word - remains, even a
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Jun 23, 2010
Cameling
rated it:
A town where left barren and depressed as a result of the closing of the chemical plant where many of their now ill citizens used to be employed, suffers yet more tragedy as young boys, 5 in all, disappear. No explanation can be found for their disappearance, their bodies aren't found so everyone assumes these are runaways trying to seek a better life outside.
But are they runaways or is there a darker evil that is preying on the boys of Innertown?
The story and the evil gradua More...
But are they runaways or is there a darker evil that is preying on the boys of Innertown?
The story and the evil gradua More...
Apr 26, 2009
James
rated it:
A good summary from Amazon by Jon Foro:
George Lister's secretive chemical plant fueled Innertown's economy for decades, but since its closure, its legacies are poverty, clusters of rare cancers, and a local wilderness populated with rumors of an unnatural selection of misshapen wildlife. When Mark Wilkinson--the first of several teen-aged boys to disappear every 12-18 in the coming years--is found hanged in the "poison woods" over a bizarre shrine of boughs, glass, and tinsel, More...
George Lister's secretive chemical plant fueled Innertown's economy for decades, but since its closure, its legacies are poverty, clusters of rare cancers, and a local wilderness populated with rumors of an unnatural selection of misshapen wildlife. When Mark Wilkinson--the first of several teen-aged boys to disappear every 12-18 in the coming years--is found hanged in the "poison woods" over a bizarre shrine of boughs, glass, and tinsel, More...
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Sep 18, 2011
David
rated it:
My one-sentence pitch for this book: "A very literary Saw with 90 percent less torture porn."
This is a very short novel, lyrically paced (which is to say it's pretty slow; give it at least 50 pages before you throw in the towel), and interestingly strung of disparate parts; it really is a very intellectual application of the narrative devices that torture-porn horror has popularized (e.g., tedium; sharp PoV shifts; disjoint narrative; catalyzing, rather than describing, terro More...
This is a very short novel, lyrically paced (which is to say it's pretty slow; give it at least 50 pages before you throw in the towel), and interestingly strung of disparate parts; it really is a very intellectual application of the narrative devices that torture-porn horror has popularized (e.g., tedium; sharp PoV shifts; disjoint narrative; catalyzing, rather than describing, terro More...
May 09, 2009
Jennifer
rated it:
Seriously disturbing scenario...young boys are disappearing in a still-inhabited site of some unspecified chemical disaster. The town policeman discovered the body of the first one and was encouraged to cover it up...and to speculate that the boys have simply left town. Told from multiple viewpoints, the policeman, the feral children who gather in the poisoned wood and old mill buildings, a loner who is killed by these children and a mysterious "moth man" who comes to study the insec
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Sep 07, 2011
Keri
rated it:
A short, bizarre fable of urban decay, lifting elements from the supernatural horror and murder mystery genres without fully committing to either. There's not much of a plot to speak of at all, and what storyline there is wanders off into a long digression about disaffected teenage sex and violence before coming back around in the last thirty pages to a highly symbolic and frankly pretty baffling ending. As a sort of literary experiment in writing beautifully and poetically about the bleak, dirt
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Sep 20, 2009
Silverluna78
rated it:
Kinda odd but an interesting, relatively short read. REALLY great lyrical writing saves it from being over the top and just not enough of any one type of topic/type of book/type of story. Hard to describe. Oh, and super creepy art!
"The definition of a page-turner really aught to be that this page is so good, you can't bear to leave it behind, but then the next page is there and it might be just as amazing as this one."
"That's the wonderful thing with nerds: the More...
"The definition of a page-turner really aught to be that this page is so good, you can't bear to leave it behind, but then the next page is there and it might be just as amazing as this one."
"That's the wonderful thing with nerds: the More...
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Apr 27, 2009
Eric
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Warning: there is a scene where a mysterious older man known as The Moth Man serves the narrator a cup of magic tea in the poison woods...
I thought Burnside's last novel, The Devil's Footprints, was an outstanding novel. This one wanders further into the mystery/thriller territory, but there are still some excellent landscape descriptions. Despite both his novels suggesting the author himself being a reclusive bibliophile (the librarian in the The Glister is named John), he has a sus More...
I thought Burnside's last novel, The Devil's Footprints, was an outstanding novel. This one wanders further into the mystery/thriller territory, but there are still some excellent landscape descriptions. Despite both his novels suggesting the author himself being a reclusive bibliophile (the librarian in the The Glister is named John), he has a sus More...
Apr 30, 2011
Tancredi
rated it:
"E' sempre estate, in un luogo o in un altro, per qualcuno."
Un poliziotto che sconta la sua accelerata nomina con il più grave dei peccati, l'omertà; un imprenditore sinistro che segue fedelmente la sua specifica e personale morale; una donna alcolizzata e mezza pazza, vittima delle visioni di una mente che non riconosce più come propria; un vecchio guardone, bambino dentro, che vive ai limiti della cittadina e della società; una banda di ragazzini troppo annoiati per pass More...
Un poliziotto che sconta la sua accelerata nomina con il più grave dei peccati, l'omertà; un imprenditore sinistro che segue fedelmente la sua specifica e personale morale; una donna alcolizzata e mezza pazza, vittima delle visioni di una mente che non riconosce più come propria; un vecchio guardone, bambino dentro, che vive ai limiti della cittadina e della società; una banda di ragazzini troppo annoiati per pass More...
Jun 25, 2010
Judith
rated it:
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 More...
Aug 12, 2010
Tuck
rated it:
not quite as good as "devils footprints" but in the same mode. gloomy, modern day gothic. northern coast style. he should be getting better, not worse. come on JOHN BURNSIDE (and NAN TALESE)
Liesl
Feb 24, 2010
Liesl rated it: 4 of 5 stars
I just met John Burnside through a colleague and had the chance to hear his beautiful poetry; this book marks my overdue exploration into his prolific world of letters. The Glister is wonderful. Mainly I was st More...
Liesl
Feb 24, 2010
Liesl rated it: 4 of 5 stars
I just met John Burnside through a colleague and had the chance to hear his beautiful poetry; this book marks my overdue exploration into his prolific world of letters. The Glister is wonderful. Mainly I was st More...
Aug 13, 2009
Bondama
rated it:
This is truly one strange book. The author creates a wholly pervasive atmosphere of dark, poisoned trees and land. The book is set in Scotland, and initially, seems to be a thriller about five young boys who have disappeared from this small village in Scotland. But this is no straightforward thriller... the actions that stem from this initial starting point are unique. I would recommend this book - but not to someone who "likes happy endings."
Nov 09, 2009
I am of two minds about this book. First of all, the story is disturbing: teenage boys keep disappearing from a forsaken Scottish town, and the town's only constable is involved in a cover up of the first boy's cult-like ritualistic murder. I stopped reading, though, when the latest victim's friends start to take matters into their own hands and brutally beat to death the innocent but creepy loner on who lives on the edge of the forest.
But the English major in me was drawn to the ch More...
But the English major in me was drawn to the ch More...
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Apr 19, 2009
Jeff
rated it:
Fable? Allegory? Coming-of-age novel? I don't know. I haven't read anything quite like it, yet I couldn't shake its dark, fetid, disorienting grip on my imagination. Sure, the novel's fifteen-year-old central narrator is far too self-aware and philosophically astute (he reads Proust for god's sake). But the character's voice is lively and engaging, and, since I cannot argue the novel is working diligently to achieve a traditional level of verisimilitude (I recall a pal once reminding me not all
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Jun 24, 2009
sisterimapoet
rated it:
I'm a fan of John Burnside's writing. I enjoy his pieces in the LRB and recall enjoying his novel 'The Dumb House' when I read it a few years ago.
I had high hopes for this novel. And I did enjoy it a lot. I liked the creepy otherworldlyness of the setting. It felt normal and yet also very strange. It reminded me a bit of Michael Faber's 'Under the Skin'. You recognise the place and the people but something doesn't feel quite right.
I like the ever present tension. More...
I had high hopes for this novel. And I did enjoy it a lot. I liked the creepy otherworldlyness of the setting. It felt normal and yet also very strange. It reminded me a bit of Michael Faber's 'Under the Skin'. You recognise the place and the people but something doesn't feel quite right.
I like the ever present tension. More...
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Mar 11, 2011
Brent
rated it:
Others have mentioned wanting to rank this on two scales and I agree. Atmosphere wise this was fascinating and held my attention throughout. But as a story I think it didn't quite work out, I was disappointed when it all ended. I'm a fan of ambiguous endings but this one didn't fit right.
Still overall I'm glad I read it, if even just for the atmosphere, the dark humor and the side stories told within.
Still overall I'm glad I read it, if even just for the atmosphere, the dark humor and the side stories told within.
Jul 31, 2009
Chris
rated it:
Ambiguity and nuance is not my specialty so I will probably have to read this one again in a year or two to think about different meanings. One way to look at it is a parable on morality--if you stay long enough in the muck do you get comfortable there and is it a willful action or do you have a choice?--but on its surface a horror novel or murder mystery. It's not tidy or obvious.
Nov 04, 2009
Chris
rated it:
Quit 100 pages in because it didn't seem to be going anywhere. Started out with an interesting premise (children disappearing from town) but then went off in a new (but sort of related) direction with a new character and his naughty teenaged friends. The author writes beautiful descriptions of the blighted, toxic landscape around the town but dropped the ball on plotline. I should have known better when I noticed a glowing blurb about The Glister on the front cover written by Scott Smith, author
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Sep 23, 2011
Schawn
rated it:
I liked this book at first and liked Leonard. I knew it was going in strange directions but its ending simply put sucked..... its left me with a hole, because up to this I was hoping for something different I guess. Very disappointing. I will have to digest this a bit more because things were definitely foreshadowed to some extent. Just too much unfinished business I guess.....
