The Night Country : A Novel

published	2003 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
first published	2005
binding	Hardcover
isbn	0374222150 (isbn13: 9780374222154)
ebook
pages	240
description	A ghost story that begins in everday tragedy, from a distinctly American master of both forms: a "scary, sad, funny . . . mesmerizing read" (Stephen King) <...more [close] A ghost story that begins in everday tragedy, from a distinctly American master of both forms: a "scary, sad, funny . . . mesmerizing read" (Stephen King) At Midnight on Halloween in a cloistered New England suburb, a car carrying five teenagers leaves a winding road and slams into a tree, killing three of them. One escapes unharmed, another suffers severe brain damage. A year later, summoned by the memories of those closest to them, the three that died come back on a last chilling mission among the living. A strange and unsettling ghost story in the tradition of Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson, The Night Country creeps through the leaf-strewn streets and quiet cul-de-sacs of one bedroom community, reaching into the desperately connected yet isolated lives of three people changed forever by the accident: Tim, who survived yet lost everything; Brooks, the cop whose guilty secret has destroyed his life; and Kyle's mom, trying to love the new son the doctors returned to her. As the day wanes and darkness falls, one of them puts a terrible plan into effect, and they find themselves caught in a collision of need and desire, watched over by the knowing ghosts. Macabre and moving, The Night Country elevates every small town's bad high school crash into myth, finding the deeper human truth beneath a shared and very American tragedy. As in his highly-prized Snow Angels and A Prayer for the Dying, once again Stewart O'Nan gives us an intimate look at people trying to hold on to hope, and the consequences when they fail. [close]
date added	04-19-07 edit book

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Alexis rated it:

08/04/08

recommends it for: Anyone who liked The Lovely Bones...and only people who liked The Lovely Bones

I loved Lobster but didn't care for this. Like other people have said, the teenagers are kind of stereotypes and their voices are annoying. Mostly I just don't care for books that have an extremely straightforward, you might even say, non-existent plot, that are only moved along because the reader has to figure things out based on clues that would be revealed quickly in the course of normal storytelling. You spend half the book figuring out what Tim's plan is, when Tim, the police officer, an...more I loved Lobster but didn't care for this. Like other people have said, the teenagers are kind of stereotypes and their voices are annoying. Mostly I just don't care for books that have an extremely straightforward, you might even say, non-existent plot, that are only moved along because the reader has to figure things out based on clues that would be revealed quickly in the course of normal storytelling. You spend half the book figuring out what Tim's plan is, when Tim, the police officer, and all the ghosts *including the one who's narrating* know what it is. It's like the movie Memento but without the excuse of the primary POV having a brain lesion. It's like Secret Window, Secret Garden without the excuse that the main character has a split personality. There's zero *reason* why you should be having to work to figure out what's going on, except I guess for the fact that the story would be boring otherwise.

Another way of putting it: This book is like if every night you closed your eyes and threw your car keys into the back yard so that you could have the "fun" of finding them the next morning, an exciting start to your day! Why not just put your keys somewhere you can easily find them so you can get out and go somewhere and get some actual excitement?

SPOILER alert for things that you will learn in the first 30 pages:

Toe, Danielle, and Marco are the names of the ones who died. Tim and Kyle survived but Kyle is seriously messed up and disabled. Brooks is an older cop, the one who investigated their accident. The accident happened a year ago.

Yes, the names of all the characters and the timeframe all of that takes 30 pages--of a short book--to figure out. The first chapter is in 2nd person and ends talking to the You who survived, and then the next chapter takes you to Brooks in his squadcar so you assume he's the "you" and if he's still upset about this he must be pretty young and new to the force? But no there's a hint about how few years he is away from retirement so okay the accident was a long time ago but then there are other hints that it wasn't and then finally you meet Kyle and you assume he's the "you" but then it turns out there were two survivors when you meet Tim and then you still go awhile not knowing how long ago the crash was, etc. It's not incoherent; it's just a matter of paying attention to figure this stuff out, but you go through making certain assumptions and then having to revise them. And it's not like you're making assumptions about storypoints that are supposed to be mysterious; you're going through a lot of confusion just to figure out who the characters are! After you figure out where things are headed, there are no more interesting realizations....less

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Josh rated it:

11/04/07

Read in October, 2007

I was given this book a few years ago by a German colleague and I finally opened it up a few weeks ago. O'Nan is a writer who, like Paul Auster, seems to enjoy more literary celebrity in Europe than in the US. His books, translated into German, line the shelves of bookshop windows, you can even find them at airports and train stations. But I'm not sure if he's at all popular or "acclaimed" in the US.

I found this book extremely disturbing, cold and creepy, and it left me feeling ho...more I was given this book a few years ago by a German colleague and I finally opened it up a few weeks ago. O'Nan is a writer who, like Paul Auster, seems to enjoy more literary celebrity in Europe than in the US. His books, translated into German, line the shelves of bookshop windows, you can even find them at airports and train stations. But I'm not sure if he's at all popular or "acclaimed" in the US.

I found this book extremely disturbing, cold and creepy, and it left me feeling horrible and empty and even colder when I finally finished it. It is written from the perspective of a group of dead teenagers in a small suburban town in Connecticut. They die in a car crash on Halloween and their ghosts return to the town one year later, and, so long as anyone in the town thinks of them, they are somehow present with that person, watching over his shoulder, peering into his thoughts. The ghosts are most often visiting one kid who survived the car accident (and who is suicidally bent on recreating the accident one year later) and the cop who was chasing the kids on the night of the accident and in fact, by chasing them too closely, too quickly, in fact caused them to run off the road. The cop's and kid's lives are totally destroyed by this accident, and the book consists of a relentless description of what they do on this one-year anniversary, when they both decide that they simply do not want to live anymore. The book is relentless, and I didn't realize how much I was hoping it would end differently until I finally finished it.

It is short, it reads like a short story stretched out to the length of a short novel. The language, world and emotional life of American suburban teenagers seem, as far as I can tell or remember, realistically depicted in the novel. Otherwise, we see this wealthy suburban town through the mind of this guilt-ridden cop and of the mother of another survivor of the accident, a boy who suffered so much physical and mental damage that he is unrecognizable to her.

The book is marketed as a horror novel, or "American Gothic" or something. What is so chilling and horrifying here is the total emptiness and ugliness of a certain kind of American life. The "thesis" of O'Nan's book, as I see it, is that this kind of life tends inevitably, albeit with varying degrees of explicitness, but inevitably, inevitably toward suicide. One thinks, mutatis mutandis, of a film like Mulholland Drive, that is saturated with the idea of suicide as the ultimate ground of narrative coherence.

The book is striking, makes a huge impact, well written; but I'm reluctant to recommend it....less

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Debbie rated it:

03/26/08

Read in February, 2008

Three teenagers die in a car wreck, leaving one of their friends untouched and the other brain damaged. The guy who walks away from the accident lost his girlfriend in the wreck, and his character made me cry throughout the book.
This is probably the single most moving detail I've ever read. It's his memory right before the car crashed:
"He remembers her sitting on his lap that last night, turning his ear to her back and trying to listen to her heart. The music was too loud, and the wind...more

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The Night Country : A Novel

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