Fell of Dark

Starred review from March 9, 2015
It’s difficult to say who Downes is speaking to in his debut novel, except that it’s not a conventional YA audience. There is no plot, and the characters, distorted by madness, never fully unfold, enacting their destruction without discovering who they are. They are knowable only through the eloquent lens of their illness. Two boys, Erik and Thorn, pass through adolescence in parallel, equally though differently scarred by loss—Erik of his father and Thorn of his sister. Obsessed by his beautiful mother and by his imaginary wife-to-come, Erik wraps himself in silence, denial, and Catholic symbolism. Thorn, who seems to visualize himself as something between a cave bear and John the Baptist, is increasingly possessed by violence. Downes’s gorgeous prose delineates their moment-by-moment interior states, making few concessions to the consensual definition of reality. For many readers, this will be an impersonal but impressive work of literary art. But for some, serendipity will strike, whether in an image or in a confused, despairing reaction to an incomprehensible world, and Downes’s vision will connect into an epiphany. Ages 14–up. Agent: Brenda Bowen, Sanford J. Greenburger Associates.

Starred review from March 15, 2015
Teenagers Erik and Thorn are descending into madness on converging paths, heading toward a ruinous first encounter with each other.Both highly intelligent boys, their lives are filled with tragedy and abuse-real, imagined, or exaggerated. Erik was abducted as a child not long after his father died. Thorn's parents have been abusing him since his sister died, and he's bullied at school. Lengthy sections from each boy's point of view at ages 14, 16, and 18 are prefaced by literary quotations, including one that the title is derived from: poet Gerard Manley Hopkins' "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day." Erik's narrative is addressed to the wife he feels he's destined to meet. Well on his way to a height of 7 feet, Erik chooses a life of silence after he begins to perform miracles and display stigmata. He reads the Bible in Latin and considers himself "a martyr waiting for [his] holy death." Hirsute Thorn is tormented by voices in his head: the "growls and grunts and whining saws" of Sawmen, Guardians, and the Architect who direct his actions and reactions. Downes brilliantly plays with language and metaphor, and he explores the dualities of sanity/insanity, beauty/ugliness, voice/voicelessness in a chilling echo of real incidents of school violence. A stunning debut novel that offers sophisticated readers a glimpse into the psychological disintegrations of two distinct characters. (Fiction. 14 & up)

April 1, 2015

Gr 10 Up-Erik is often silenced by headaches and suffers from more mysterious afflictions including stigmatalike bleeding. He spends his time walking, writing, waiting for his soulmate, and trying to discover his purpose on earth. Thorn is plagued by demons and the voices that come from within. Eventually, the stories of these two deeply disturbed young men collide. Though stylistically ambitious, the pacing struggles as the only real plot point comes at the very end when Erik must stop Thorn from doing something terrible. Though the imagery Downes implements is vivid, it is often violent toward children and animals. Terms such as stigmata and demons are mentioned, but are often co-opted by the disturbed characters and aren't used in relation to faith, which may offend some. While authors like Daniel Kraus, especially in his Scowler (Delacorte, 2013), use dark themes and images quite effectively, in this case it feels purely like an attempt to push boundaries and shock. Pair those issues with unreliable narration and page-long digressions on subjects like food preferences, and Fell of Dark will likely confuse and disturb far more readers than it engages. VERDICT Recommended only for large collections or those with a special interest in fictional portrayal of mental illness.-Elizabeth Saxton, formely at Cleveland Public Library, OH

Copyright 2015 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2015
Grades 9-12 *Starred Review* This slow-burning, enigmatic debut consists of a pair of entwined internal monologues from two equally troubled but fundamentally different teenage boys. Erik's father was killed in a bike accident, and after experiencing some shadowy, unnamed trauma in a garage, he obsesses over Catholic religious imagery, imagining blood streaming from stigmata and taking a vow of silence, all while growing to a staggering height. Thorn's sister died in an accident, and afterwards his parents, once loving and caring, become hellish demons in his eyes. Meanwhile, he hears voices from quasi-archetypal figures who battle for control of him. In starkly poetic stream-of-consciousness prose, touched with both gentleness and violence, Erik and Thorn each try to understand his place in the world before their shared final moments, when they meet for the first time. Downes powerfully explores ideas of God, faith, heaven, and hell, but that exploration is never overt. Rather, as Erik's and Thorn's narratives twist around each other, the places where they touch, moments of both similarity and opposition, reveal tiny, snowballing shreds of clarity. There's not much in the way of plot, but readers willing to sink into the depths of two unstrung teens and their frantic individual struggles to understand the cruelties and redemptions of the universe will be rewarded by this disarming, thought-provoking, and entrancing story.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)