Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone
A Novel
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3.3 • 26 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Shirley Jackson meets The Twilight Zone in this riveting novel of supernatural horror—for readers who loved Ransom Riggs’ Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
A village on the Devil‘s Moor: a place untouched by time and shrouded in superstition. There is the grand manor house whose occupants despise the villagers, the small pub whose regulars talk of revenants, the old mill no one dares to mention. This is where four young friends come of age—in an atmosphere thick with fear and suspicion. Their innocent games soon bring them face-to-face with the village‘s darkest secrets in this eerily dispassionate, astonishingly assured novel, infused with the spirit of the Brothers Grimm and evocative of Stephen King‘s classic short story “Children of the Corn” and the films The White Ribbon by Michael Haneke and Village of the Damned by Wolf Rilla.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Can a terrible history generate a terrible present? That is the question posed by German-born author Kiesbye's dark second work of fiction (after Next Door Lived a Girl), composed of linked stories set in an archetypal rural German town in what seems to be the immediate postwar period. As in Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, the vague setting heightens the narrative tension, as Christian, first, provides us with a framing device in the funeral of Anke, one of a group of young friends now elderly and distant. Each tells their story in flashback, a perspective that suits the delicate prose. Extraordinary things happened to the villagers 40 years earlier. Some are tinged with the supernatural a traveling carnival worker hints at mysterious origins; an annual cooking contest ends badly and some are truly horrifying: incest, child murder, and a father's brutal act of violence that leaves permanent scars. Why are these things happening in Hemmersmoor? Are tales of witches and curses to be believed? Or does the real reason lie at the end of the railroad tracks? Too subtle to be lurid yet too spooky for comfort, this book should appeal to readers of psychological fiction and literary tales of the supernatural.
Customer Reviews
Definite horror, definite bleak
Interesting prose and mashup of previously written individual tales of gothic dread. No resolution or big crescendo that ties any chapters together. Seems the increasing depravity of each successive story is the point. All terrible people with no redeeming qualities so don’t look for a hero