Onyx reviews: The Night Country by Stewart O'Nan

The Night Country looks like a horror novel. The chapter titles are taken from famous horror movies and its dust jacket features blurbs from people like Stephen King and Peter Straub, but it is a literary novel that deserves comparison to The Lovely Bones. The story is told from the point of view of a trio of ghosts, the revenants of three teenagers killed in a Halloween night car accident. A year later, the town's collective memory brings Marco, Toe and Danielle back to the community.

Their spirits are dragged from person to person as events bring them to mind during the twenty-four hour period before the accident's anniversary. They can't interact with people or things, but they have full access to the minds and memories of living people. Marco narrates and acts as spokesperson for the three ghosts, relating not only what they observe but also what his fellow spirits experience.

There were five teens in the car that fateful night. One of the survivors was completely uninjured—physically. Tim's girlfriend Danielle, who was sitting on his lap in the back seat, shielded him from the impact before she was ejected. The other, Kyle, suffered severe neurological damage and now functions at the level of a mentally handicapped juvenile. His parents find themselves fondly remembering the person he was before—a rebellious heavy-metal-loving drug dealer. The specter of Kyle's former self appears to the ghosts, but they can't interact or communicate with him.

A sixth man bears emotional scars from the accident: Brooks, the middle-aged cop who was first on the scene. In the intervening year his job performance has suffered greatly and he is obsessed with the accident, for reasons that will be revealed over the course of the book. He's tempted to quit his job and move away, but two things hold him in the suburban New England community—his ailing grandmother and inertia. He's never lived anywhere else or done any other job and it's late in life to start over.

As Halloween approaches, the ghosts spend most of their time with Brooks and Tim, who has taken Kyle under his wing, driving him to and from work at the grocery store. Brooks suspects that Tim has something planned for Halloween night and juggles his regular duties with keeping a vigilant eye on the haunted teenager.

The Night Country is a poignant look at kind of mark the death of some of its teenagers can have on a community. Everyone in the town is affected. Some choose to observe the anniversary. Others, like Kyle's father, have found peace by avoiding the issue completely and losing himself in his job.

The novel is only slightly more than two hundred pages long, but it's not a quick read. Each word and sentence has been thoughtfully crafted and deserves careful attention. Its dreamlike quality is tinged with the Bradbury-esque nostalgia associated with Halloween. Marco and his ghostly companions free-flow through Avon, yanked around at the whims of its residents. They see people at their most vulnerable—sad, alone, and lost in the past.

Like Brooks' life, the book has a certain inertia that guides it toward the inevitability of midnight. But the ghosts are on a mission, too. They have a plan to help them find their own peace with what happened a year earlier. As with The Lovely Bones, there can be no happy endings, for the dead remain so and the living must choose to go on or give up.