By Paul Carrier
Is it contradictory to claim that the author of a hefty 464-page novel is in a hell of a hurry to spin his tale? Not if the book is The Burn Palace, by Stephen Dobyns. His breezy style, with its galloping plot and rat-a-tat action, pulls the reader along at a brisk clip as Dobyns relates the horrific goings-on in the fictional town of Brewster, Rhode Island.
The setting may be New England, but think Stephen King, not Norman Rockwell. In fact, King wrote a blurb for the novel's dust jacket praising the book as by turns "terrifying, sweet and crazily funny."
It's American gothic in Little Rhody.
Only three pages in we learn that a newborn boy has disappeared from the local hospital, thanks to the negligence of nurse Alice Alessio. There's a snake in the missing infant's crib. And the baby's mother, far from being distraught, dismisses the child as "a Devil baby."
A sense of foreboding quickly envelops the reader, and the disquiet deepens as the menacing story unfolds. That's because the infant's disappearance is far from the only oddity in Brewster, which Dobyns places near Rhode Island's quite-real Great Swamp. English settlers and their allies massacred a large number of Narragansett Indians there in 1675, so in Dobyns' capable hands, the swamp has a dark and brooding quality.
Alessio, the nurse who left the maternity ward unattended for a quickie with a doctor, vanishes after the baby is kidnapped. A visiting insurance investigator carrying an odd-looking coin said to be a badge of recognition among witches is scalped while sitting in his car near the swamp. A smothering fear descends on Brewster, where there's talk of satanism and witches, shape shifting and Indian ghosts, ritualistic rapes and malevolent coyotes. Then the bodies start piling up.
The cast of characters grows. The ever-expanding police investigation stalls. Townspeople grumble that the cops are inept. Dobyns juggles so many story lines that, initially, it's hard to see how they're linked. Yet even as tensions mount, Dobyns' playfulness peaks through in the names (and nicknames) of some of his characters.
Alessio's co-workers dub her Nurse Spandex, because she has tucked and tightened her uniform to accentuate her curvaceous figure. Bingo Schwartz is a mumbling, opera-loving state police detective who is working on the case. And then there's portly, grossly incompetent small-town cop Whole-Hog Hopper, who never met a snack he didn't like.
Dobyns explores several themes in The Burn Palace, including intolerance, mass hysteria and delusional behavior. The narrative offers a no-nonsense look at the logistics of police work, but there's also a dash of magical realism here.
As a native New Englander who once lived in Rhode Island, I can attest to the fact that Dobyns' knowledge of the state's geography, history and quirkiness gives The Burn Palace a credible sense of place. When Whole-Hog Hopper loses Alessio while staking out her apartment, for example, it's because he drives off to buy a grinder. That, Dobyns knows, is what submarine sandwiches are called in southern New England.
In an interview with Kirkus Reviews earlier this year, Dobyns said he has tried to "really push the limits" of the mystery genre in The Burn Palace. Many publishers praised but rejected the novel, Kirkus Reviews noted, because "they were dubious about the (large) number of characters and the eclectic narrative approach, which mingles a literary tone with the linear storytelling of a police procedural and couples the grotesque with humor."
I'm not at all dubious about this electrifying page turner, but here's a word of advice. If you ever find yourself driving down a road in Rhode Island and you spot a sign announcing that you're about to enter Brewster, pull a U-turn as fast as you can and get out of there, pronto.
Because while some seemingly supernatural phenomena have rational explanations, others do not.
The setting may be New England, but think Stephen King, not Norman Rockwell. In fact, King wrote a blurb for the novel's dust jacket praising the book as by turns "terrifying, sweet and crazily funny."
It's American gothic in Little Rhody.
Only three pages in we learn that a newborn boy has disappeared from the local hospital, thanks to the negligence of nurse Alice Alessio. There's a snake in the missing infant's crib. And the baby's mother, far from being distraught, dismisses the child as "a Devil baby."
A sense of foreboding quickly envelops the reader, and the disquiet deepens as the menacing story unfolds. That's because the infant's disappearance is far from the only oddity in Brewster, which Dobyns places near Rhode Island's quite-real Great Swamp. English settlers and their allies massacred a large number of Narragansett Indians there in 1675, so in Dobyns' capable hands, the swamp has a dark and brooding quality.
Alessio, the nurse who left the maternity ward unattended for a quickie with a doctor, vanishes after the baby is kidnapped. A visiting insurance investigator carrying an odd-looking coin said to be a badge of recognition among witches is scalped while sitting in his car near the swamp. A smothering fear descends on Brewster, where there's talk of satanism and witches, shape shifting and Indian ghosts, ritualistic rapes and malevolent coyotes. Then the bodies start piling up.
The cast of characters grows. The ever-expanding police investigation stalls. Townspeople grumble that the cops are inept. Dobyns juggles so many story lines that, initially, it's hard to see how they're linked. Yet even as tensions mount, Dobyns' playfulness peaks through in the names (and nicknames) of some of his characters.
Alessio's co-workers dub her Nurse Spandex, because she has tucked and tightened her uniform to accentuate her curvaceous figure. Bingo Schwartz is a mumbling, opera-loving state police detective who is working on the case. And then there's portly, grossly incompetent small-town cop Whole-Hog Hopper, who never met a snack he didn't like.
Dobyns explores several themes in The Burn Palace, including intolerance, mass hysteria and delusional behavior. The narrative offers a no-nonsense look at the logistics of police work, but there's also a dash of magical realism here.
As a native New Englander who once lived in Rhode Island, I can attest to the fact that Dobyns' knowledge of the state's geography, history and quirkiness gives The Burn Palace a credible sense of place. When Whole-Hog Hopper loses Alessio while staking out her apartment, for example, it's because he drives off to buy a grinder. That, Dobyns knows, is what submarine sandwiches are called in southern New England.
In an interview with Kirkus Reviews earlier this year, Dobyns said he has tried to "really push the limits" of the mystery genre in The Burn Palace. Many publishers praised but rejected the novel, Kirkus Reviews noted, because "they were dubious about the (large) number of characters and the eclectic narrative approach, which mingles a literary tone with the linear storytelling of a police procedural and couples the grotesque with humor."
I'm not at all dubious about this electrifying page turner, but here's a word of advice. If you ever find yourself driving down a road in Rhode Island and you spot a sign announcing that you're about to enter Brewster, pull a U-turn as fast as you can and get out of there, pronto.
Because while some seemingly supernatural phenomena have rational explanations, others do not.
