Glister

November 24, 2008
In his bleakly beautiful seventh novel, Scottish author Burnside (The Devil's Footprint
) delivers a cautionary tale illustrating that greed and an indifference to suffering are the real horrors of modern life. In recent years, five teenage boys have disappeared from the coastal village of Innertown, where an abandoned chemical plant deep in the forest is slowly poisoning its rapidly declining population. The official line is that the missing boys are seeking a better life away from the town whose “sole business is slow decay.” A 15-year-old lad, who's found solace in books and foreign films that he can barely understand, is determined to find out what happened to his friends and why the town's lone cop spends so much time in those tarnished woods. Burnside expertly details an apocalyptic landscape where the “expectation of failure” is rampant. While the ending feels hurried, Burnside's flawless prose explores how defeat is only a state of mind.

January 1, 2009
What begins as a spooky tale of serial murder evolves into something much stranger and riskier —an eschatological fable about innocence, evil and personal responsibility.

Seven years ago, John Morrison covered up the killing of Mark Wilkinson. The boy had walked into the poisoned woods surrounding Innertown, the English hamlet blasted by the mysterious but baleful chemicals produced by the Consortium, and disappeared. Morrison soon found what had happened to Mark: He 'd been ritualistically slain and hung from a tree. Dumbfounded and overwhelmed, Morrison reported the incident to Brian Smith, the city father who 'd promoted him from night watchman of the Homeland Peninsula Company to town constable, and then watched Jenner, Smith 's fixer, hide the corpse and spread a story of how the boy had run off to join the circus. That story is getting a little thin now that four other boys have vanished in the woods at roughly 18-month intervals, but Morrison feels locked into his lie and helpless to prevent further outrages. So it falls to someone else to take action: the school friends of the missing children. Under the leadership of sadistic Jimmy van Doren, they 're ready to rock. Although successive chapters bounce from one character 's point of view to another, the leading role falls to Leonard Wilson, the thoughtful boy who 's taken up with both Elspeth, Jimmy 's forthright ex-girlfriend, and Eddie, a female member of Jimmy 's gang. But although Leonard is given more air time than any supporting player, his fears and feelings are much more definite than he is. Burnside (The Devil 's Footprints, 2008, etc.) uses plot, character and mystery only as gambits to launch his spiritual exploration of the horrifyingly thin line between childhood innocence and sociopathic amorality, and ultimately between sins of commission like serial murder and sins of omission like serial cowardice.

A truly unusual experience awaits readers willing to forgo the obvious pleasures of the genre.

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January 15, 2009
Burnside ("The Devil's Footprints") sets his new novel in Innertown, an economically depressed town still reeling from the closure of the chemical plant years earliera chemical plant that leaked contaminants into the water and soil and caused strange mutations in animals and people. Innertown's problems don't end there, however: nearly every year, another boy disappears, never found. Policeman John Morrison discovered the first boy's body but covered it up. Now he's stuck pretending each subsequent disappearance is merely a runaway boy and not a case of murder. Meanwhile, a young boy named Leonard wonders if he might be the next victim. Burnside's story is haunting and twisted but, ultimately, incomprehensible and unresolved. He evokes a mood of an eerie otherworld and lets plot details swirl like fog around readers. Not a usual murder mystery, this is suitable (but not essential) for large public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 11/1/08.]Laurel Bliss, San Diego State Univ. Lib.

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