2014 read #90: Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone by Stefan Kiesbye.

Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone by Stefan Kiesbye
199 pages
Published 2012
Read from September 25 to September 26
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

I'm amused that a creative writing professor at Eastern New Mexico University would write a novel about ignorant, inbred, superstitious villagers in a flat landscape forgotten by the 20th century, and all the vicious jealousies, cruelties, and hidden crimes of rural life. For one strange interval of my life I had a tenuous link with ENMU, a place where academic mediocrity goes to stagnate, and the idea that some lost soul condemned to that post produced a novel like this is just so damn apt.

The book itself is not quite so perfect. Kiesbye's prose is adequate, occasionally rising to a surprising phrase but largely as flat and unremarkable as the coastal German boglands around Hemmersmoor. The four narrators fail to develop specific voices, ruminating on past murders and rapes and blackmails and poisonous loves with identical tones of defeat. The novel is more of a sequential string of vignettes, each chapter a largely self-contained short story in which, almost inevitably, someone dies at the end. The predictable rhythm fails to build any sense of rising tension or unease -- Kiesbye finds his motif in the very first chapter, when the village mobs together to kill an outsider family in a bout of superstition, and thereafter coasts along the same path with little deviation.