Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone

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.

September 1, 2012
Infidelity, bullying, savage beatings, sororicide, curses, murder and the devil himself all come into play in this quietly savage meditation on evil. In an age when "torture porn" still makes regular returns to the multiplex every Halloween, it's worth being reminded that novelists, especially gifted ones, can make the trespasses we inflict on others just as ghastly as any chain-saw massacre. German-born novelist Kiesbye (Next Door Lived a Girl, 2005) gives it his all in a series of interconnected stories that smack of shades of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. With a title lightly copied from an old Tom Waits growler ("Your house is on fire, children are alone," from the song "Jockey Full of Bourbon"), the novel opens on a present-day funeral in the frigid community of Hemmersmoor, a seemingly pastoral village in northern Germany. Christian, who fled the village for years, has returned with childhood friends Alex, Martin and Linde to bury their companion, Anke. But it's soon obvious that all is not what it seems when Linde spits on her friend's grave and murmurs, "I just hope she can see me from hell." From this moment, the lives of these little monsters unfold, each chapter read by a different narrator. Christian unveils a horrible confession of a murder committed to gain admission to a carnival tent. Martin tells of a botched festival that ends in the communal murder of a foreigner and her children. Alex dares a classmate to try his luck in the frigid waters of a frozen pond. The narration, as with all the stories, is both clinically dispassionate and chilling. "We threw his shoes and his clothes after him that night, along with the fifty marks. We made a solemn pact to keep quiet forever," Kiesbye writes. Not always clear, but nearly always startling. A devious intimation of homegrown terrors likely to keep readers awake long after closing time has come and gone.

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May 15, 2012

I've been promised that this is a really spooky novel--right down to the title, taken from the dark nursery rhyme; it's billed as Shirley Jackson meets The X-Files. The setting is Hemmersmoor, where fear creeps around every corner; four village children are about to find out what's going on. From the author of There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor's Baby--clearly, Kiesbye has a macabre turn of mind.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2012
Hell's entrance is in Hemmersmoor, says a carnie near the front of this wicked novel. By book's end, readers will not only believe it but also begin to wonder if similar dark portals exist in their hometowns, toosuch is the quiet, unnerving effect of Kiesbye's Brothers Grimmlike prose. A group of childhood friends return to their small German village for a funeral, setting off a collection of stories culled from their suppressed memories: tales of brutal witch hunts, ghosts, incest, infanticide, and curses, each yarn spun by Kiesbye with a jarringly offhand innocence. Big, disturbing moments are tossed within blocks of text as if they are business as usual, and it's just this unceremonious style that fills each page with menace. The tender, terrifying, capricious nature of children is the repeated theme; adding to it the occasional stunning image (two lovers melting through an iced-over pond to be frozen into statues) makes this an episodic, poetic, nightmarish offspring of Grace Metalious' Peyton Place (1956) and Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)