Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone

Sometime after WWII, the German village of Hemmersmoor is a place permeated by an unspoken evil. Legends tell of monsters and devils, but the true monsters are human, the true extent not revealed until the last story. Children who are victims of child abuse, incest, or worse go on to commit equally terrible acts on others in a cycle of violence. Narrators Alison Larkin and James Langton have the skill to make these creepy stories even creepier. Their gentle tones belie the horrors of a town seemingly lost in time. M.S. (c) AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine

July 2, 2012
Can a terrible history generate a terrible present? That is the question posed by German-born author Kiesbye’s dark second work of fiction (after Next Door Lived a Girl), composed of linked stories set in an archetypal rural German town in what seems to be the immediate postwar period. As in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, the vague setting heightens the narrative tension, as Christian, first, provides us with a framing device in the funeral of Anke, one of a group of young friends now elderly and distant. Each tells their story in flashback, a perspective that suits the delicate prose. Extraordinary things happened to the villagers 40 years earlier. Some are tinged with the supernatural—a traveling carnival worker hints at mysterious origins; an annual cooking contest ends badly—and some are truly horrifying: incest, child murder, and a father’s brutal act of violence that leaves permanent scars. Why are these things happening in Hemmersmoor? Are tales of witches and curses to be believed? Or does the real reason lie at the end of the railroad tracks? Too subtle to be lurid yet too spooky for comfort, this book should appeal to readers of psychological fiction and literary tales of the supernatural. Agent: Markus Hoffmann, Regal Literary.