This is the kind of novel you end a little stunned. I have a friend whose literary tastes I greatly respect, a gifted writer herself, who raved about O'Nan to me--this is the first novel of his I've ever read, but won't be the last. She actually gave me her copy of this book when I mentioned I couldn't find it in stores. It was recommended in a horror recommendation list, and my friend expressed surprise it would be thought of that way.
Having now read it I understand what she means. Inside a blurb boasts this won the International Horror Guild Novel of the Year. But this reads more like literary fiction in its prose style, and there's not a whiff of the supernatural in content. The monster roaming the small Wisconsin town of Friendship, Wisconsin in 1871 isn't a vampire, a werewolf or zombie--it's diphtheria.
This story is in the rare second person, through the perspective of Jacob Hansen, a union civil war veteran who acts as the town's sheriff, pastor and undertaker. I have another writer friend who considers second person a gimmick and unbearable to read. The thing is I can't imagine this story written any other way. Telling this story through first person or third would be too normal, sound too down home. But something about that second person voice tells us there's something a bit askew from the beginning. Second person, especially given it's always in present tense, almost always sounds lyrical. Somehow, O'Nan's prose is more muscular than that. It's the kind often described as "spare." A lot of sentence fragments and short declarative sentences. It comes across as more stark than spare considering the tone and the short novel--I'd say it's no more than about 60,000 words--reads very quickly; I read it in almost one sitting.
The novel is harrowing. That deceptively simple seeming style doesn't spare you the horror of the epidemic or how it unravels Jacob's mind, heart and spirit. Indeed, there's an aspect to the book that might be too much for many, that pushed it over the line (and some might find over the top) into the grotesque, and for me saved only by the restraint of the writing. I think the blurb from the Wall Street Journal review got it right: As eloquent as it is unsettling.
