Son of Destruction

by Kit Reed

A spellbinding American Southern Gothic thriller with a supernatural twist – a past secret has the power to destroy the future.

When Lucy Cartaret dies, her journalist son Dan returns to her hometown, Fort Jude, Florida, in search of his real father and claiming to be investigating the mysterious deaths of three elderly women. Spontaneous human combustion, experts say. But why? Surely it’s more than coincidence – and what links these deaths to Dan’s mother? It soon becomes clear that something terrible happened during his mother’s last year in town, thirty years before. But the social elite of Fort Jude remain tight-lipped. The families who run the town will do anything to protect their own – anything. 

Genres: Paranormal

240 pages, Hardcover

First published October 26, 2012

About the author

Kit Reed was an American author of both speculative fiction and literary fiction, as well as psychological thrillers under the pseudonym Kit Craig.

Her 2013 "best-of" collection, The Story Until Now, A Great Big Book of Stories was a 2013 Shirley Jackson Award nominee. A Guggenheim fellow, she was the first American recipient of an international literary grant from the Abraham Woursell Foundation. She's had stories in, among others, The Yale Review, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Literature. Her books Weird Women, Wired Women and Little Sisters of the Apocalypse were finalists for the Tiptree Prize. A member of the board of the Authors League Fund, she served as Resident Writer at Wesleyan University.

Reviews

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is was my first foray into Kit Reed's novels, and I found it to be quite a fascinating excursion. Reed's writing is incisive and revealing, her stories cutting and profound. As I said in my SF Signal review, the book "[makes] the familiar strange and the strange inseparable from the familiar." Reed's greatest act of legerdemain is to make weirdness seamless and organic, so that it can shock while resonating with lived experience. I'm impressed every time I pick up something new of hers to read.

[Wendy Bousfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though she loves her son dearly, Lucy has never discussed her own adolescence nor identified Dan’s father. After Lucy’s death, Dan Carteret finds a chest containing a small gold football, a newspaper clipping about a death by spontaneous combustion, and two photographs—one of five high school boys on a beach, the other his mother as a young girl, in front of a Spanish stucco house. Convinced that these are clues to his father’s identity, Dan leaves his job as a newspaper reporter and travels to Fort Jude, Florida, where his mother grew up. In Fort Jude, Dan encounters men and woman who had known his mother in high school. Though now adults, Lucy’s classmates are traumatized something that happened at a high school beach party that Lucy attended. When Dan questions them about Lucy, they are evasive.

SON OF DESTRUCTION is narrated from multiple viewpoints: Dan, several Fort Jude residents, and his dead great-grandmother, Lorna Archambault, who had raised Lucy after her parents’ deaths. One of the three Fort Jude residents to die of spontaneous combustion, Lorna is the subject of the newspaper clipping found among Lucy’s effects. Assuming that one of the high school jocks in the photograph must be his father, Dan attempts to track them down. The father Dan seeks, however, is Walker Pike, a classmate of Lucy’s, who had been snubbed because of his poverty and disreputable father. Though Walker shadows Dan throughout his sojourn in Fort Jude, the two do not meet until the very end.

Remaining aloof from close-knit Fort Jude society, Walker is the most sympathetic character in SON. From chapters from Walker’s point of view, the reader learns that at the fateful beach party, Walker had saved Lucy and another classmate, Jessie, from Brad Kalen, one of the young men in the photograph, who had tried to rape both girls. After Walker rescues Lucy, the two fall deeply in love. They live together for a year in Cambridge, where Walker attends M.I.T. When Walker informs Lucy’s controlling grandmother, Lorna Archambault, of their relationship, Lorna becomes furious and subsequently catches on fire. Horrified, Dan concludes that he must unwittingly cause other people to burn to death when angry. Fearing that he might harm Lucy, now pregnant with Dan, Walker abandons her. Returning to Fort Jude, Walker, a computer genius, earns a good living without interacting directly with other people.

For me, a serious problem is that SON waffles about whether or not Walker is cursed with the propensity to start fires. Furthermore, I simply did not believe that Walker would act or draw the conclusions that he does. Would Walker really conclude, when Lorna goes up in flames during a confrontation, that he is responsible? After all, growing up in Fort Jude, Walker would surely know that, before Lorna, two residents had also combusted inexplicably. Second, if Walker were really a “firestarter,” wouldn’t he want to tell his adult son, who might have inherited his father’s curse? Passages from Lorna’s point of view suggest that it was not Walker’s revelation about his love for Lucy, but her own intense anger at her unfaithful husband, that burns her up: “The ball of heat inside her grows; in the unlikeliest of cavities it flickers, getting brighter as she seethes in the depths of her recliner, unaware and unprotected, roaring, Who’s sorry now?” (62). But, if Walker was never a firestarter, the ending, in which Walker about to use his ability deliberately to burn another person, makes no sense.

Though a suspenseful page-turner, SON OF DESTRUCTION seemed to me a not entirely successful attempt at Southern Gothic. SON, however, lacks the vividly memorable characters or a compelling sense of place that characterize such Gothic writers as Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, or Truman Capote. Early on, Lucy’s dead grandmother describes Fort Jude as one of those quirky, isolated, blighted places found in the Southern Gothic: “In this town, extraordinary things come down—Fort Jude is the lightning capitol of the world. Sinkholes yawn and eat entire cars or get big enough to devour the house, the kids’ climber, the birdbath in your front yard. People by the thousands went to light Santeria candles outside a bank on Route 19 because they thought they saw the Virgin in the glass front. Storms blow up in seconds—hurricanes, tornados, rains that can sweep a man’s car into a culvert and drown him like that. At sunset, sharks come in to feed in the swash. Half a boxer dog floated to the top of Circle Lake and a family in Far Acres found an escaped boa constrictor coiled under the porch. . .” (16-17). Fort Jude, of course, is known (if at all) for its three residents who died of spontaneous combustion. Unfortunately, after this promising initial description, SON includes little description of the place, focusing on the tangled relationships of Fort Jude’s rather banal residents.

I read SON OF DESTRUCTION back-to-back with Truman Capote’s OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS, a masterpiece of Southern Gothic. Perhaps any similar book might pale by comparison. However, I found neither Fort Jude nor its residents are very interesting. Reed’s Brad Kalen is no larger-than-life villain, but a swinishly self-centered alcoholic.

[rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kit Reed was a peach & I decided to honor her memory by revisiting Son of Destruction while home in Florida w my mom. Apparently, I like to test the boundaries of how much Southern Gothic any one human can immerse themselves in on short notice. Still a delight, although not without its flaws, but to detail them is to also despoil many of the true pleasures of the tale so I’ll just say that this is well worth your time if you like sharp lively prose unspooling a tale of weird Florida, weirder Floridians, and spontaneous human combustion.

[Craig Pittman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating but slightly flawed story about a Florida town where three different people have died from spontaneous human combustion.

Veteran novelist Kit Reed, whose family has deep roots in Florida, has a deft and knowing touch when it comes to describing life in the town of Fort Jude, particularly the wide gulf that separates what passes for society there from what's looked down on as trash.

Reed sets her plot in motion with the death of someone who escaped Fort Jude years ago -- Lucy Cateret, valedictorian of her high school class, someone who never talked about her past but kept a box containing a few things, including a newspaper clipping showing the smoking remains of one of the spontaneous combustion victims. When Lucy dies, her son, aspiring reporter Dan Cateret, decides to travel down to Fort Jude and figure out what happened to her there -- and who his father is. He pretends to be writing a story about the combustions -- but soon discovers he has a personal connection to the most famous one, and as a result can channel the ghost of the victim while visiting her house.

I'm not big on supernatural stuff in the novels I read, but the scene where Dan relives the night of the fire through the eyes of the dead woman is well written and even believable. Reed's solution to the mystery of what happened is also nicely done, and she leads us right up to a breathtaking climax.

What keeps me from giving this book five stars? Two things. One is that as she tells the story from various viewpoints of Dan and the people he meets around Fort Jude, we hear a lot of repetition of the same memories and the same rationalizations and justifications. After a while I just kept thinking, "Get ON with it." The second is that the final showdown of the story occurs off-screen. I understand why that's so, but as a reader I felt a little cheated. I wanted to see it happen right in front of my eyes, and Reed is such a sharp writer she could have made it so realistic that we readers could have felt the fire on our faces. Oh well.

This is only one of Reed's novels about Fort Jude, so now I have to go track down the others.

[S.A. · Rating 2 out of 5]

This books seemed like an experiment in random stream of consciousness writing. A few times I wondered why I was still reading the words. Ultimately there were too many characters and too little focus on the main concept. It sounded like a great idea but everything seemed to resolve itself by the first halt of the book.

What really killed the book was the horrible dialog. There's a chapter where one of the characters just keeps saying or thinking "Oh."

I started thinking "oh no."

The idea seemed to have such potential... what a shame.

[Kit · Rating 5 out of 5]

This isn't really "my review" because I wrote the book! It's by James Lovegrove in Financial Times weekend, Oct. 20
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/b72ebe...

Headline reads:
Buried truths
A poignant and gripping novel about psychic powers

click through to see the rest

AND now this, by Gary K. Wolfe, in LOCUS
http://www.locusmag.com/Reviews/2013/...

[Lisa Gray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well gosh, I loved this book even though I can't actually figure out what happened!!! haha. Guess the conclusion isn't necessary in order to like the story, the characters and the mystery.

[Susan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Geez, I thought this book would never end.