Neverhome by Laird Hunt

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Neverhome is a the story of a lady who becomes a soldier in the Civil War. It’s full of very beautiful language. Also, the sections of disorientation are good. When the vicissitudes of war render the protagonist confused, the prose reflects that. That’s well done.

The tenderness between the protagonist and her husband is wonderful. I enjoyed the false Odyssey ending. Won’t say more than that.

The novel is a bit short. The development of the protagonist from raw recruit to old war dog happens off-stage. And other plot points like that. So the ending felt less realistic and grounded than if there had been a bit more prior development. There could also have been more concrete detail to the backstory. Or it could have come in a different order. For instance, I thought at first that the husband back at the farm was her brother. The author already spreads the story of their romance out over several sections; if the first of those had come nearer to the beginning of the novel, I would have been less confused.

The character portraits are wonderful. There’s nobility and honor as well as cruelty and pettiness. Comedy and tragedy. The stock Civil War characters are there, as well as

The narrative passes through many different scenes, like paintings in a gallery. You sense the the world is a kaleidoscope that the war has shaken up. Nobody knows what the arrangement will be when it finally settles down. And we get these glimpses of the past order of things just before it passes away. Or are they glimpses of a new order only now emerging?



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In the House in the Dark of the Woods by Laird Hunt

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a lovely scientific treatise on the life cycle and development of the witch. It comes, of course, in three phases. You don’t realize at first that that’s what you’re reading. Because the various witches at various points in the cycle appear very different. It’s only at the end of the novel, when we see the metamorphoses from phase to phase, that it all comes together.

So if you start reading In the House in the Dark of the Woods and it seems mixed-up and confusing, don’t worry. It all comes together in the end. It’s a big picture with a lot of complex emotional valences, and the author can only show a bit at a time. A lot of different clues have to be in place before the big reveal can happen.

And if you read somewhere that it’s a fairy tale, and you want the swineherd to marry the princess at the end, well… It’s not going to be like that. It’s true that it’s written very much like a fairy tale. Very much in the Neil Gaiman mode. There’s a Brothers Grimm style of diction that it does a good job adhering to.

But it doesn’t quite have the same kind of plot as a fairy tale. The plot is much more like going to the zoo. You pass a series of animals that, at first, seem like they don’t have anything to do with each other. But if you have a good guide–and Laird Hunt is a good guide–you’ll see, by the end, that it’s all one ecosystem.



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