Home After Dark
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the acclaimed memoir Stitches comes a stunning story of one boy's heartbreaking coming of age in 1950s America.
After his mother abandons the family, thirteen-year-old Russell Pruitt moves with his Korean War veteran father to a small town in southern California. Eager to fit in and figure out the mystifying rules of being a man, he succumbs to the sway of boys more feral than himself--leading to an act of betrayal that will have devastating consequences. Told through cinematic artwork that will transfix readers with its visceral potency and grace, Home After Dark is a mesmerizing evocation of a boy's struggle to survive the everyday brutalities of adolescence, and forge his own path to manhood.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Small's haunting coming-of-age tale, 13-year-old Russell Pruitt grows like a determined weed in the wake of masculinity so toxic it has literally killed a menagerie of pets in the small California town where he lives with his troubled father. The mystery of the mangled animals is one of several dark threads in Small's fictional follow-up to his critically acclaimed memoir, Stitches. In a hero's-journey narrative punctuated by episodic adventures, Russell searches for a sense of "home," as Small again juxtaposes the horrors of an unhappy childhood with the bleak underbelly of 1950s and '60s America illustrated with his signature fine pen lines and grey wash. Even the grill of his father's Buick growls menacingly. The men and boys in Russell's life are absent, monstrous, victimized, or all of the above; Russel's entrapment takes physical form when he's stuck in an abandoned drainage tunnel in the arroyo. His Chinese-immigrant landlords show him kindness, but being young, angry, and white, Russell doesn't see it, at least not at first. The story traffics in archetypes the mean kid who frames the weirdo; the festering cruelty beneath the idyllic small-town facade but never tips over into trite. With strikingly few words, Small tells Russell's story in close-ups of bullies' sneers and bird's-eye views of parking lots. Cats, dogs, lions, and other animals haunt Russell's waking life and his dreams, perhaps because he, too, fights tooth and claw to survive. In depicting the toll of the harsh environment surrounding these lost boys, Small unearths an (almost) impossible tenderness. (Sept.)
