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Fires
Deer running through a ghost neighborhood. A boy trapped in a basement for eight years. Three young people locked in a violent sex triangle. Come inside. Already caught between the ambition and alienation of life at an Ivy League school, Jon Danfield must come face to face with a revelation about his small-town past. His journey will take him away from the halls of privilege and into the heart of the monstrous forest fire threatening his childhood home. On deserted suburban streets lined with perfect houses, Danfield must confront an American dream corroded by unspeakable acts of cruelty.
194 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
May 14, 2020
this is a little book about damage. damaged people, property, pasts, hell—a whole town...i see the comparisons to bret easton ellis, but in this case, i think, they aren't completely fair. at least these characters are, for the most part, trying to be human—they aren't vapid, affectless sociopaths with interchangeable personalities. they aren't great people, but at least they aren't boring.
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January 23, 2012
FIRES is a novel by Nick Antosca about “three young people locked in a violent sex triangle…” well, sort of. It’s also about “a boy trapped in a basement for eight years,” but at the same time, it also has “deer running through a ghost neighborhood.” Oh, and there are no quotation marks, for like, when the characters talk and stuff. But this isn’t a problem. In as few words as possible, I can say that FIRES is actually a pretty difficult book to label and describe without revealing too much of the plot. I can also say that it is fairly easy to read because FIRES features some of the sharpest prose I have ever seen.
A brief summary of FIRES would sound horribly mundane and rather dull, especially when compared to, say, a thriller like CODEX or a Tom Clancy novel (yuck). Part of the charm lies in the fact that many people can/could probably relate to some of the events that take place in the book. It talks about: love, anger, sex, frustration, depression, violence, sickness, drinking/alcoholism and a few other things that make up significant portions of our everyday lives.
The author basically tells a story that sort of unravels in reverse, as the major characters are quickly revealed in just the first few pages. On page 2: “James Dearborn is someone I know from high school. And George Mursey is a big, affable guy from my home town, a neighbor from just across the street. A high school teacher, a football coach. Not a guy you’d expect to— Wait. I don’t want to think about it yet. I want to think about Ruth.” And the next section of the book, of course, is titled “Ruth.”
The book isn’t just one long continuous account of Jon Danfield’s life and it’s not a stream-of-consciousness shit-fest either. FIRES is separated into several little sections that could best be described as moments. These moments never mark the beginning of a new page, but rather, highlight several moments of Danfield’s life. These moments can begin anywhere on the page. And with section markers like “Girl’s Bedroom” and “Being Sick” everything is pretty much revealed in the title, no fancy word-play here.
From the very beginning, Antosca forces us (the readers) to ask several questions about the text and its characters (which he eventually answers, thank God). Some reviewers have described FIRES as rather slow and occasionally boring and I’m going to be brutally honest here when I say that without a doubt, there are times when you will be thinking “why the hell is Antosca talking about this and what does it have to do with the story” but at the same time, it’s the little unnecessary tidbits of information and seemingly mundane portions of the book that actually interested me the most. The stuff inside Danfield’s head.
Things like the sometimes long bouts of introspection (and there are a lot) allowed me to truly discover the character of Danfield, as dialogue is not always representative of a character. FIRES certainly lacks the sort of expository fluff that plagues countless other novels and boasts a writing style that is analogous to several other contemporary minimalists but still manages to offer something new to the genre. Think: Blake Butler, Sam Pink, Tao Lin, Noah Cicero or even Brandon Scott Gorrell and you’ll get an idea of the writing style. Repetitious lines like: “Little. A little” and “All right, okay,” are just two examples of a cyclic writing-style that embraces the flaws and imperfections of everyday speech. In FIRES, the characters speak like real people, and I applaud Antosca for actually writing authentic/believable dialogue that actually sounds interesting because it is so uninteresting (really!). In FIRES, the characters often mishear things and a lot of the time, respond with one-word answers, like “’kay” or “cool.”
Awesome.
Stay with FIRES until the very end if you want to solve the mystery of the book because there is a mystery, sort of... You may not fall in love with: Dan, his parents, Ruth, James, George, Jeffrey or even Zach but that’s not the point. Each character is beautifully flawed and Antosca is a master when it comes to allegorical depiction and metaphorical representation. Pay close attention to the dialogue and imagery. Antosca’s very good with his words and every word in this novel counts.
A brief summary of FIRES would sound horribly mundane and rather dull, especially when compared to, say, a thriller like CODEX or a Tom Clancy novel (yuck). Part of the charm lies in the fact that many people can/could probably relate to some of the events that take place in the book. It talks about: love, anger, sex, frustration, depression, violence, sickness, drinking/alcoholism and a few other things that make up significant portions of our everyday lives.
The author basically tells a story that sort of unravels in reverse, as the major characters are quickly revealed in just the first few pages. On page 2: “James Dearborn is someone I know from high school. And George Mursey is a big, affable guy from my home town, a neighbor from just across the street. A high school teacher, a football coach. Not a guy you’d expect to— Wait. I don’t want to think about it yet. I want to think about Ruth.” And the next section of the book, of course, is titled “Ruth.”
The book isn’t just one long continuous account of Jon Danfield’s life and it’s not a stream-of-consciousness shit-fest either. FIRES is separated into several little sections that could best be described as moments. These moments never mark the beginning of a new page, but rather, highlight several moments of Danfield’s life. These moments can begin anywhere on the page. And with section markers like “Girl’s Bedroom” and “Being Sick” everything is pretty much revealed in the title, no fancy word-play here.
From the very beginning, Antosca forces us (the readers) to ask several questions about the text and its characters (which he eventually answers, thank God). Some reviewers have described FIRES as rather slow and occasionally boring and I’m going to be brutally honest here when I say that without a doubt, there are times when you will be thinking “why the hell is Antosca talking about this and what does it have to do with the story” but at the same time, it’s the little unnecessary tidbits of information and seemingly mundane portions of the book that actually interested me the most. The stuff inside Danfield’s head.
Things like the sometimes long bouts of introspection (and there are a lot) allowed me to truly discover the character of Danfield, as dialogue is not always representative of a character. FIRES certainly lacks the sort of expository fluff that plagues countless other novels and boasts a writing style that is analogous to several other contemporary minimalists but still manages to offer something new to the genre. Think: Blake Butler, Sam Pink, Tao Lin, Noah Cicero or even Brandon Scott Gorrell and you’ll get an idea of the writing style. Repetitious lines like: “Little. A little” and “All right, okay,” are just two examples of a cyclic writing-style that embraces the flaws and imperfections of everyday speech. In FIRES, the characters speak like real people, and I applaud Antosca for actually writing authentic/believable dialogue that actually sounds interesting because it is so uninteresting (really!). In FIRES, the characters often mishear things and a lot of the time, respond with one-word answers, like “’kay” or “cool.”
Awesome.
Stay with FIRES until the very end if you want to solve the mystery of the book because there is a mystery, sort of... You may not fall in love with: Dan, his parents, Ruth, James, George, Jeffrey or even Zach but that’s not the point. Each character is beautifully flawed and Antosca is a master when it comes to allegorical depiction and metaphorical representation. Pay close attention to the dialogue and imagery. Antosca’s very good with his words and every word in this novel counts.
November 6, 2007
The author writes beautifully, and he possesses that rare and elusive quality - taste.
The flaws in FIRES are obvious . . . thin plot, characters some people would consider unsympathetic or very LESS THAN ZERO, even a bit of very occasional over-writing.
FIRES resonated with me, though, despite its flaws and for reasons deeper than the beautiful writing. I read it in the evenings of three busy days and it affected my dreams. In a sense I'm glad I've finished it. It's bleak and nasty, the way FLEURS DU MAL is . . . but it lives. So do its characters--which proves that perhaps they aren't derivative, after all
This is a novel about Yale, the dark, the cold, the drugs, the cigarettes, the sex . . . in this zone it's all meaningless, consciousness is to be endured with stoicism and . . . taste. The odyssey back home and to The Fires only accentuates the lessons of the cold New Haven milieu . . .
Think Rimbaud and Baudelaire and Huysmans . . . But the beauty in the writing, and the author's almost unerring taste, and his alive observant eye and the way he converts what he sees and smells and feels into language suggests an intensity that still has the potential to break out into something big and visionary . . . and perhaps even spiritual.
The flaws in FIRES are obvious . . . thin plot, characters some people would consider unsympathetic or very LESS THAN ZERO, even a bit of very occasional over-writing.
FIRES resonated with me, though, despite its flaws and for reasons deeper than the beautiful writing. I read it in the evenings of three busy days and it affected my dreams. In a sense I'm glad I've finished it. It's bleak and nasty, the way FLEURS DU MAL is . . . but it lives. So do its characters--which proves that perhaps they aren't derivative, after all
This is a novel about Yale, the dark, the cold, the drugs, the cigarettes, the sex . . . in this zone it's all meaningless, consciousness is to be endured with stoicism and . . . taste. The odyssey back home and to The Fires only accentuates the lessons of the cold New Haven milieu . . .
Think Rimbaud and Baudelaire and Huysmans . . . But the beauty in the writing, and the author's almost unerring taste, and his alive observant eye and the way he converts what he sees and smells and feels into language suggests an intensity that still has the potential to break out into something big and visionary . . . and perhaps even spiritual.
March 17, 2007
1) There's no more romantic way of rendering one's own recent past than by portraying it as an existential void filled with stale beer, skunk weed, sour coke, and rough sex; 2) the fevered intensity of Antosca's prose, in descriptions of said void especially, makes his attempts at creating a contrapuntural suburban ideal (which would then, theoretically, be punctured by the revelation of the Dark Secret) somewhat less than convincing; 3) the vivid, fevered writing that throws his conception off-balance is also the book's biggest strength, and assures the reader that Antosca's a pretty talented writer who's likely to produce some exceptional work probably sooner rather than later.
July 22, 2007
Really fine work. For me, pacing was a bit slow in the beginning, but I was hooked nonetheless, because I knew, knew there was this dark burning secret (no pun intended) I had to find out about. I was initially offed at present tense, but by the last page, I don't know how it could have been done in a more effecive way. From about page one hundred on, I started even reading down the hallway, to the kitchen, the (ahem) ladies room. Stunning climax - I'll continue to glance through at some of the more beautifully haunting graphs. I'm rounding up because of the lingering effects it's having on me, and to spite that slow start!
OH! And I agree, this has tremendous cinematic potential!
OH! And I agree, this has tremendous cinematic potential!
October 10, 2007
I'll probably write a longer review later, as 'Fires' is under the popular radar, and deserves a wider readership, but for now I'll just point out that it's compelling, raw, and refreshingly unpleasant. The second half, in particular (I may be alone here), is so gorgeously and murkily written that the menace of the plot is nearly unnecessary.
August 11, 2011
3.5 stars. A quick read that delves into the darkness of the American soul and effectively creates a real sense of unease in the reader. However, depictions of party life at Yale are unrealistically excessive and there's a certain shallowness in the character development that detracts from what could have been a more compelling exploration of evil.
June 3, 2007
I read this book in two days. It reads very fast and I enjoyed the plotting which was tense and good and very film-like and really somebody should turn this into a script and pitch it to Hollywood-land or something.
Also, for Millicent, forms of the word "lugubrious" appear twice.
Also, for Millicent, forms of the word "lugubrious" appear twice.
May 26, 2008
I like novels that bring a flaming apocalypse to the suburbs. There really aren't enough.
July 17, 2007
I made pretty quick work of this one. It began beautifully, but the plot lost a bit of steam a quarter ways in. A short-lived lull however. I find little difficulty in saying things definitely "heat up" half way through the novel.
I read much of this while in a van with no air conditioning. I would advise maybe reading this somewhere cool...because the heat in the book becomes obscene and it makes for quite an uncomfortable after-reading feeling if your own scenario isn't too different. Also, I ended up falling in love with Ruth. I'm not entirely sure why yet.
I read much of this while in a van with no air conditioning. I would advise maybe reading this somewhere cool...because the heat in the book becomes obscene and it makes for quite an uncomfortable after-reading feeling if your own scenario isn't too different. Also, I ended up falling in love with Ruth. I'm not entirely sure why yet.
July 31, 2007
Nick's writing is a breath of fresh air.
February 24, 2010
You should read this book and not some quick sentences I write on the book.
October 28, 2016
Nick Antosca's signature is clearly his talent at infusing his work, whether it be his writing or his work in television, with a creeping and increasingly urgent sense of dread and unease. In Fires, Nick Antosca puts this talent to great use, crafting a small cast of characters whose interlocking relationships are both violent and sensual. The near-Biblical settings (the isolating intensity of an Ivy League college and a smoky, deserted neighborhood, abandoned by wildlife) create the perfect killing ground upon which Antosca explores the ideas of memory, connection, trauma, and the awesome power of fire.
My reviews for the additional short stories: "Rat Beast," "The Girlfriend Game," and "Winter Was Hard" can be found under my reading progress of Antosca's collection The Girlfriend Game.
My reviews for the additional short stories: "Rat Beast," "The Girlfriend Game," and "Winter Was Hard" can be found under my reading progress of Antosca's collection The Girlfriend Game.
May 23, 2019
An absolutely perfect book. The most concise and beautiful description I have ever read.
February 17, 2020
This dark, disturbing story unfolds with a growing tension that wound me up like a spring. The writing is gorgeous.
July 9, 2022
If Bret Easton Ellis and Khalid Patel collaborated on a disaffected college student novel, the end result might have become Fires. A stunning debut novel.
July 21, 2024
One of the strangest books I've read but it definitely kept me captivated the whole time.
December 9, 2023
5 stars if had read this in my 20’s.
December 7, 2008
Maybe I'm just not smart enough for this book, because I certainly didn't get it. The style of writing was truly unique which at least made it interesting. However it just felt like I was missing something major....
January 29, 2012
This book is an easy quick read and throws you right in the mix without much character development. It grabs you and doesn't let go until the very end. Jealousy, drug use, fire... what more could you want?
December 9, 2014
I finished this in one sitting. Under three hours. Yes, it's another novel about damaged and disaffected young people who chain smoke & binge drink in an ever-intensifying haze of ennui and dread, but it's a pretty damned good one.
August 30, 2012
Taking this and THE OBESE to the beach this weekend. Looking forward to kicking back with this.
Read
December 10, 2011A boy meets girl story turns dark and complicated when secrets from the past come to light against the backdrop of a suburban hometown engulfed in flames.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews