The Night Country, by Stewart O'Nan

The American dream turns to nightmare

Fiction is occult art, and no American novelist wields his ouija board quite like Stewart O'Nan. In just 10 years, O'Nan has published 11 books, each one embracing a new perspective. As Halloween rolls around, this spookily gifted writer has finally crossed to the other side, emerging with a hair-raising tale narrated by teenage ghosts.

Fiction is occult art, and no American novelist wields his ouija board quite like Stewart O'Nan. In just 10 years, O'Nan has published 11 books, each one embracing a new perspective. As Halloween rolls around, this spookily gifted writer has finally crossed to the other side, emerging with a hair-raising tale narrated by teenage ghosts.

The place is Avon, Connecticut, where O'Nan lives. The time: midnight on Halloween. While the town sleeps, three prank-happy ghosts come back to haunt the survivors of a terrible car accident that claimed their lives a year ago. The story was inspired by a real case in which a teenager committed suicide with a friend by driving into a tree, at the same spot where his older brother died in a crash six months before.

With The Night Country, O'Nan turns this event into a near-mythic story. After a come-hither prologue - which pays homage to Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes - we meet the survivors and get to know their pain. Tim escaped with nary a wound, but wonders why he lived. Kyle, once an arrogant bad-boy, now walks like a near-zombie thanks to brain damage and a reconstructed face. Kyle's parents try to mother him with dignity but it puts a heavy burden on their marriage. Finally, there is Officer Brooks, first on the scene a year ago. Brooks finds himself reeling into middle age with a lake of sadness in his throat.

The ghosts of those who died keep watch over these three unlucky souls, observing their thoughts, taunting them with eerie pyrotechnics. They flit in and out of the narrative and steal the reins from O'Nan. In death, they remain perpetual teenagers.

Not so for the survivors. Shifting deftly from one character to the next, O'Nan enters the heart of a community wracked by guilt and grief. Officer Brooks and Tim each have an atonement to make, and we find them tacking towards one another in an awful march.

In spite of its horror-flick plot and goblin-night atmosphere, The Night Country is not a scary read. It is, however, a chilling one. Avon is a bucolic suburban town, where the busy production of beauty and convenience ought to demonstrate control over fate, nature and life's darker forces. Car crashes explode that sense of wealth, health and safety; they are providence's cackling guffaw.

O'Nan plays upon the secret menace of the woods which surround Avon. Spangled with memorial ribbons and crosses, they creep out and cloak this beautifully true novel in shadow. Something wild and dark lurks in them and, as the ghosts tell us, there is no safety there. "We're past that," they announce: "the grinning pumpkins left behind," the stoops and warm windows. "Out here there's nothing but creeks and marshland," they warn. "Here you can still get lost if you want to."

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