Hurt People, the debut novel of writer Cote
Smith is a real barn burner and easily one of the year’s best. It covers
familiar territory but does so with gusto, bravery and a keen sense of
adolescent wonderment and precariousness. It skillfully inserts the reader into
the shoes of these two unnamed brothers whose world is small yet still
shrinking, whose adult counterparts are not much better off, and even a
faint-hearted glimpse at a different world, or an interesting one, is enough to
make one of them fall into a black hole of menace and the other one follow
willingly due to his brotherly duty. It is a dark novel with dark themes and
great amounts of sadness, but it is told through the eyes of a young boy whose
worldview and intelligence is limited to what his parents tell him and what he
sees on the schlocky B-horror films he likes to watch. I always try to make
note of what other books I am reminded of while reading, and the one of many
that kept coming to mind was Scott Heim’s first novel, Mysterious Skin, oddly
enough, another novel that turns the barren landscape of Kansas into wasteland
of shaky dreams and nightmarish predators using eloquent, poetic descriptions
of rural economic and social decay to create a kind of modern fairy tale where
the goblins walk on two feet and the prize at the end is the discovery of love
in our imperfect relationships. At the beginning of the novel, it is the start
of summer. It is 1988 and in Leavenworth, Kansas, a city surrounded by four
different prisons, two brothers simply want to spend their time at the pool of
their apartment complex. But beyond that, we see second handedly the world of
their parents falling part: they are recently divorced, and the mother, Aggie,
has shacked up with a quietly cruel ex-con named Rick, who also happens to be
her boss at the golf course she works at, and their dad, a respected policeman,
is exhausted by the continued search for an escaped con and finds relief in the
bottle and poor decisions. Out of this windstorm of neglect comes Chris, an
older man the boys meet at the pool, who slowly seduces the older brother by
teaching him new dives and letting him in on certain secrets, like what the
tattoo on his ankles means. Slowly, his influence begins to poison the older
brother, who acts out toward his mother, father and Rick, until things take a
really dark turn during an apocalyptic tornado. I didn’t expect this novel to
have such a dreamlike quality, much like the abduction angle in Heim’s novel.
For me they worked because of how much empathy the two young boys emitted, even
when they were at each other’s throats. It adds another layer of
otherworldliness to action, especially one scene near the end that takes place
in the woods behind their apartment complex. Filled to the brim with witty scenes,
revelatory dialogue and a haunting final few pages, this adult novel with
youthful energy was a dark, brooding pleasure.
Rating: 5/5
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