With Halloween just a couple weeks in the rearview (and enjoying all the childhood memories sparked by watching my kids’ experiences), I’ve been looking at the neighborhood my family lives in, and trying to see it through the eyes of my children. A recent session with Google Earth allowed me to show them the Kansas house I grew up in as well as take a virtual tour of my childhood neighborhood pointing out various spots of interest and infamy. We had our very own crazy lady, a get-off-my-lawn man and a mysterious house that the neighbor kids fixated upon as a catch-all for dark lore that was good for testing mettle (I dare you to ring the doorbell, I dare you to look in the window, I dare you to climb the back yard fence). Looking around at my current locale, I’m not sure which houses, which neighbors and which stand-by stories are filling those key developmental roles for my own kids, but I’m confident they’re their.
At least we don’t live anywhere Kyle Edwards’ section of Eden Road in North Georgia 1976.
Grant Jerkins' latest At the End of the Road has so much to recommend it - fine, smooth prose, just the right amount of '70s period detail to bring back our own memories - investing us personally in the events and characters (whereas too many of those period details would distract us and create distance from the book's emotional core), well defined characters and strong and sometimes new takes on sturdy, familiar tropes - the American family in disintegration, young siblings banding together against the world, and the outsider cop proving herself (this time a Southern black woman - again, just right with the light touch, never getting heavy handed). But those elements are all supporting the centerpiece - the neighborhood Boo Radley (really the best Boo since Tom Franklin's Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter - only this time...)
Ten year old Kyle’s Centennial summer starts in earnest when he accidentally causes a car wreck and then starts a wild fire - both his fault, but neither through any malicious intent – he hides his role in these incidents from his family and lives with a constant dread that he will be exposed. So when the recently paralyzed stroke victim across the way lets Kyle know that he’s onto him and threatens to expose him unless Kyle comes back at midnight to do some work for him – Kyle reluctantly agrees to.
Holy Molee, Jerkins' At the End of the Road goes to some creepy places, but then, after last year’s A Very Simple Crime, that’s exactly what I wanted from it (from him, that is). This time the childrens’ imaginations could not have come close to capturing the depths of ugly living in their neighborhood and the creepy neighbor across the way is a creep and then some. The recent past/childhood setting mixed with the truly horrific revelations of the wicked coming this way will invite favorable comparisons to Stephen King, but by far the most awful and resonant aspect of the book to me was the portrait of psychological control wielded by a monster and exerted over children - reminded me of Laura Lippman’s I'd Know You Anywhere as well as Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door.
The book’s structure is challenging, switching point of view to multiple cast members and swerving around the chronology like a slalom skier, but the chapters are bite-sized and they detail enough truly unforgettable scenes (my favorite involves Kyle driving a stick shift, hauling gruesome cargo, five miles an hour toward a reservoir in the middle of the night), that the persistent reader should be well satisfied - really, the back half of the book unravels with such an unstoppable momentum that cautious as you may be, and as far back as you may stand, you're still going to be stung.
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
