Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, by Paul Tremblay (2015)
I picked up Paul Tremblay’s DISAPPEARANCE AT DEVIL’S ROCK because I really liked his narcoleptic detective stories, THE LITTLE SLEEP and NO SLEEP TILL WONDERLAND. In those books, Mark Genevich solves complex mysteries while getting nagged by his mother, dodging guilt about his head injury, and losing consciousness at inconvenient times. Those books are an homage to noir classics like THE BIG SLEEP, as well as other oddball genre tributes like Richard Brautigan’s DREAMING OF BABYLON (which is one of my all-time favorite books).
Paul Tremblay is probably better known for his horror stories; he’s a Bram Stoker award winner and a juror for The Shirley Jackson Awards.
DISAPPEARANCE AT DEVIL’S ROCK, has an obvious affinity with Jackson’s work because Tremblay’s families and communities are similarly fragmented.
A thirteen-year-old boy, Tommy Sanderson, goes missing after a late-night rendezvous in a deserted park. The word “disappearance” in the title is significant because adults immediately distrust thirteen-year-olds, they are inscrutable little human clones. Sure, Tommy might be injured or abducted, but he might also be a runaway.
It's a sad to think that a mother could be blindsided to that degree, and not realize her child is so deeply disaffected. But Tommy’s father, William, disappeared eight years ago and Elizabeth didn’t see that coming, either. She wonders if her son is following a family tradition.
Because this is a horror story, the Sanderson family breakup has a supernatural twist: Elizabeth sees a ghostly simulacra of her son the day after he vanishes, and then diary pages torn from Tommy’s journal mysteriously appear in the middle of the living room floor.
Elizabeth, her mother Janice, and daughter Kate Immediately accuse each other of surreptitiously introducing the pages, then lying about it. They know they should trust each other but can’t, because other possibilities (like a stranger sneaking in, or Tommy’s ghost delivering the cryptic messages) seem more outlandish than a family member psychologically crumbling from stress and grief. After a painful argument, “the kitchen is all quiet tears and quick breathing.”
There are many paranormal red herrings in the book, but the most important take-away seems to be that destructive family-disconnect. The problem isn’t routed in specific instances of abuse (at least, not in the Sanderson household) just typical suburban self-absorption. A repeated catchphrase in the novel is “I just can’t do this right now.” In stressful situations, characters tend to turtle and offer the lame excuse that they’re having a bad day. But when pressed, characters are perfectly capable of enduring awkward or painful confrontations. Elizabeth doesn’t shirk from identifying Tommy’s body, for example, reading police interview transcripts about the night he disappeared, or attending the killer’s trial.
Unfortunately, a habit of constant low-grade deflection has already done the damage.
Kate tries to address the problem at the end of the novel as she and her mother move out of their house. Kate wants to leave a couple of Tommy’s blank journal pages in his empty bedroom. “There’s none of his drawings on the pages because we’re taking him with us. And it means no more secrets. That’s what we’re leaving behind us. The secrets.”
Good advice, but it’s difficult to break habits of a lifetime. Elizabeth immediately lies about needing to go to the bathroom, returns to the house and removes the pages.
DISAPPEARANCE AT DEVIL’S ROCK is painful to read at times because it presents such an accurate picture of what it’s like to be a thirteen-year-old boy. I remember the loneliness, insecurity, and idiocy of growing up, and the experience is a little like visiting Niagara Falls: both wonderful and sleazy, but not something I want to do every day.
The novel also powerfully describes adult angst faced with the potential loss of a child: Elizabeth is “empty of hope and couldn’t be more disappointed in herself that it simply isn’t there . . . she’s terrified of the yawning void of life of life without Tommy, but also terrified of the microfuture, of the horrors of the truth about what happened . . .” I liked the differentiation of grief, both over-arching despair and tiny triggers. Russell Banks’s characters similarly deadened themselves in THE SWEET HEREAFTER, to cope with the tragic school bus crash.
That psychology strikes me as realistic but, like the literal transcriptions of teenage conversations, it’s not particularly enjoyable. It feels “like” “totally” “hardo” “catchphrase” “wicked bad.”
Maybe it’s a valuable exercise in humility, revisiting frailties that one ordinarily tries to sublimate. All the same, I find horror stories like DISAPPEARANCE AT DEVIL’S ROCK frustrating because of the cringey character behavior. I’m not talking about people who wander into basements even though movie audiences scream at them to stop. My reservation is more related to a character saying, “I just can’t do this right now,” when they obviously can.
There is a horror story tradition of characters being consumed by grief. In FRANKENSTEIN, Victor falls into a “brain fever” and is completely incapacitated for six months after the monster kills his friend Clerval. The theatrical response is supposed to reflect the depth of his affection. Horror stories understand that small slights, like careless middle-school glances, can be extraordinarily painful. They assume, then, that events like family deaths must be exponentially worse.
I’m not sure the emotional math is correct. People devastated by the loss of a pet often deal with the death of a parent with great dignity. People are sporadically fragile and resilient, but horror stories sometimes force those puzzle pieces into the wrong spots.
And when I find the behavior of horror story characters to be ridiculous, it’s difficult to remain fully immersed in the story I usually balk when I’m expected to accept something just because it’s theoretically possible.
The behavior of the three young boys in DISAPPEARANCE AT DEVIL’S ROCK is a good example. They sneak out of the house to drink beer in a park. They are a little young, but that’s still easy to believe. One of the boys, Tommy, just runs away from the group for no reason and is lost in the woods. That’s harder to believe. But Josh and Luis immediately protest that they weren’t teasing him, so readers assume there probably WAS some middle school bullying. Again, that’s reasonable. Later, we discover that the three boys have been befriended by a creepy adult who has been feeding them beer and convincing them that he is a “seer.” They don’t mention this suspicious individual, Arnold, even though their missing friend is in obvious peril and everyone is scrambling for clues. In an era of stranger-danger, that’s harder to believe. The psychological explanation is just barely plausible: the boys are embarrassed that they have been so easily manipulated by a conman. Then we learn that the three boys were taunted into killing Arnold’s abusive uncle by pushing shards of broken glass into his chest.
That’s where my credulity taps out. I know that people can do horrible things for trivial reasons, but just because something is possible doesn’t mean it’s likely. Even if I managed to accept that these particular boys were seduced into committing murder, and they jammed glass into a man’s chest without the shards breaking or deflecting off ribs, I can’t accept the fact that they kept it a secret.
These boys are weak; they have been softened up by a lifetime of parental nagging and would have cracked the first time a police officer lowered an eyebrow. But the slow unspooling of creepy events depends on this implausible inversion of moral strength and weakness. Boys who can be manipulated into murder could just as easily be manipulated into admitting it in an interrogation. Their spasms of weakness and strength feel wrong, and that’s off putting. Given their vivid characterization, it seems far more likely that the boys would have resisted the temptation to commit murder and wilted under interrogation.
I don’t think horror fans share my reservation though, given the book’s popularity. And overall, I liked the book, particularly its depiction of “evil.” Arnold explains that the devil is someone you don’t see directly, only out of the corner of your eye, and that certainly matches Elizabeth’s experience of the flitting shapes that haunt her peripheral vision after Tommy disappears. The implication is that if you are not “direct” or forthright in your dealings, the devil will exploit that flaw and infiltrate your life with flanking movements.
Tremblay's Puritan forebears would have been proud.
I also like Kate’s symbolic struggle to integrate her fragmented personality. After Tommy’s diary pages mysteriously appear, Elizabeth buys a motion activated security camera to see if someone is sneaking them into the house. The camera is controlled by a phone app, and Kate deliberately wanders into camera range so she can watch her own ghostly presence on her phone screen. The fascination with doppelgangers reminds me of Phil Dick’s A SCANNER DARKLY where a police detective becomes psychotic and spies on himself by watching hours of recorded security camera footage from his own home.
Kate recognizes that something is wrong within herself, and she has an impulse to make it right, but doesn’t know exactly how.
How many of us do?
But Kate tries, exhibiting a combination of character strength and weakness that I find compelling.
Paul Tremblay is probably better known for his horror stories; he’s a Bram Stoker award winner and a juror for The Shirley Jackson Awards.
DISAPPEARANCE AT DEVIL’S ROCK, has an obvious affinity with Jackson’s work because Tremblay’s families and communities are similarly fragmented.
A thirteen-year-old boy, Tommy Sanderson, goes missing after a late-night rendezvous in a deserted park. The word “disappearance” in the title is significant because adults immediately distrust thirteen-year-olds, they are inscrutable little human clones. Sure, Tommy might be injured or abducted, but he might also be a runaway.
It's a sad to think that a mother could be blindsided to that degree, and not realize her child is so deeply disaffected. But Tommy’s father, William, disappeared eight years ago and Elizabeth didn’t see that coming, either. She wonders if her son is following a family tradition.
Because this is a horror story, the Sanderson family breakup has a supernatural twist: Elizabeth sees a ghostly simulacra of her son the day after he vanishes, and then diary pages torn from Tommy’s journal mysteriously appear in the middle of the living room floor.
Elizabeth, her mother Janice, and daughter Kate Immediately accuse each other of surreptitiously introducing the pages, then lying about it. They know they should trust each other but can’t, because other possibilities (like a stranger sneaking in, or Tommy’s ghost delivering the cryptic messages) seem more outlandish than a family member psychologically crumbling from stress and grief. After a painful argument, “the kitchen is all quiet tears and quick breathing.”
There are many paranormal red herrings in the book, but the most important take-away seems to be that destructive family-disconnect. The problem isn’t routed in specific instances of abuse (at least, not in the Sanderson household) just typical suburban self-absorption. A repeated catchphrase in the novel is “I just can’t do this right now.” In stressful situations, characters tend to turtle and offer the lame excuse that they’re having a bad day. But when pressed, characters are perfectly capable of enduring awkward or painful confrontations. Elizabeth doesn’t shirk from identifying Tommy’s body, for example, reading police interview transcripts about the night he disappeared, or attending the killer’s trial.
Unfortunately, a habit of constant low-grade deflection has already done the damage.
Kate tries to address the problem at the end of the novel as she and her mother move out of their house. Kate wants to leave a couple of Tommy’s blank journal pages in his empty bedroom. “There’s none of his drawings on the pages because we’re taking him with us. And it means no more secrets. That’s what we’re leaving behind us. The secrets.”
Good advice, but it’s difficult to break habits of a lifetime. Elizabeth immediately lies about needing to go to the bathroom, returns to the house and removes the pages.
DISAPPEARANCE AT DEVIL’S ROCK is painful to read at times because it presents such an accurate picture of what it’s like to be a thirteen-year-old boy. I remember the loneliness, insecurity, and idiocy of growing up, and the experience is a little like visiting Niagara Falls: both wonderful and sleazy, but not something I want to do every day.
The novel also powerfully describes adult angst faced with the potential loss of a child: Elizabeth is “empty of hope and couldn’t be more disappointed in herself that it simply isn’t there . . . she’s terrified of the yawning void of life of life without Tommy, but also terrified of the microfuture, of the horrors of the truth about what happened . . .” I liked the differentiation of grief, both over-arching despair and tiny triggers. Russell Banks’s characters similarly deadened themselves in THE SWEET HEREAFTER, to cope with the tragic school bus crash.
That psychology strikes me as realistic but, like the literal transcriptions of teenage conversations, it’s not particularly enjoyable. It feels “like” “totally” “hardo” “catchphrase” “wicked bad.”
Maybe it’s a valuable exercise in humility, revisiting frailties that one ordinarily tries to sublimate. All the same, I find horror stories like DISAPPEARANCE AT DEVIL’S ROCK frustrating because of the cringey character behavior. I’m not talking about people who wander into basements even though movie audiences scream at them to stop. My reservation is more related to a character saying, “I just can’t do this right now,” when they obviously can.
There is a horror story tradition of characters being consumed by grief. In FRANKENSTEIN, Victor falls into a “brain fever” and is completely incapacitated for six months after the monster kills his friend Clerval. The theatrical response is supposed to reflect the depth of his affection. Horror stories understand that small slights, like careless middle-school glances, can be extraordinarily painful. They assume, then, that events like family deaths must be exponentially worse.
I’m not sure the emotional math is correct. People devastated by the loss of a pet often deal with the death of a parent with great dignity. People are sporadically fragile and resilient, but horror stories sometimes force those puzzle pieces into the wrong spots.
And when I find the behavior of horror story characters to be ridiculous, it’s difficult to remain fully immersed in the story I usually balk when I’m expected to accept something just because it’s theoretically possible.
The behavior of the three young boys in DISAPPEARANCE AT DEVIL’S ROCK is a good example. They sneak out of the house to drink beer in a park. They are a little young, but that’s still easy to believe. One of the boys, Tommy, just runs away from the group for no reason and is lost in the woods. That’s harder to believe. But Josh and Luis immediately protest that they weren’t teasing him, so readers assume there probably WAS some middle school bullying. Again, that’s reasonable. Later, we discover that the three boys have been befriended by a creepy adult who has been feeding them beer and convincing them that he is a “seer.” They don’t mention this suspicious individual, Arnold, even though their missing friend is in obvious peril and everyone is scrambling for clues. In an era of stranger-danger, that’s harder to believe. The psychological explanation is just barely plausible: the boys are embarrassed that they have been so easily manipulated by a conman. Then we learn that the three boys were taunted into killing Arnold’s abusive uncle by pushing shards of broken glass into his chest.
That’s where my credulity taps out. I know that people can do horrible things for trivial reasons, but just because something is possible doesn’t mean it’s likely. Even if I managed to accept that these particular boys were seduced into committing murder, and they jammed glass into a man’s chest without the shards breaking or deflecting off ribs, I can’t accept the fact that they kept it a secret.
These boys are weak; they have been softened up by a lifetime of parental nagging and would have cracked the first time a police officer lowered an eyebrow. But the slow unspooling of creepy events depends on this implausible inversion of moral strength and weakness. Boys who can be manipulated into murder could just as easily be manipulated into admitting it in an interrogation. Their spasms of weakness and strength feel wrong, and that’s off putting. Given their vivid characterization, it seems far more likely that the boys would have resisted the temptation to commit murder and wilted under interrogation.
I don’t think horror fans share my reservation though, given the book’s popularity. And overall, I liked the book, particularly its depiction of “evil.” Arnold explains that the devil is someone you don’t see directly, only out of the corner of your eye, and that certainly matches Elizabeth’s experience of the flitting shapes that haunt her peripheral vision after Tommy disappears. The implication is that if you are not “direct” or forthright in your dealings, the devil will exploit that flaw and infiltrate your life with flanking movements.
Tremblay's Puritan forebears would have been proud.
I also like Kate’s symbolic struggle to integrate her fragmented personality. After Tommy’s diary pages mysteriously appear, Elizabeth buys a motion activated security camera to see if someone is sneaking them into the house. The camera is controlled by a phone app, and Kate deliberately wanders into camera range so she can watch her own ghostly presence on her phone screen. The fascination with doppelgangers reminds me of Phil Dick’s A SCANNER DARKLY where a police detective becomes psychotic and spies on himself by watching hours of recorded security camera footage from his own home.
Kate recognizes that something is wrong within herself, and she has an impulse to make it right, but doesn’t know exactly how.
How many of us do?
But Kate tries, exhibiting a combination of character strength and weakness that I find compelling.
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