[IR3]⇒ PDF Free The Nght Country Stewart O'Nan 9780747571742 Books

The Nght Country Stewart O'Nan 9780747571742 Books

Download As PDF : The Nght Country Stewart O'Nan 9780747571742 Books

The Nght Country Stewart O'Nan 9780747571742 Books

THE LAST NIGHT AT THE LOBSTER is one of my favorite books. The Red Lobster is closing in this New England town and O'Nan follows the various characters around. Sounds dull, right? This is fiction, but these people sound a lot more real than those in most novels. Ever since I've been looking forward to his next project.

That's not the case with THE NIGHT COUNTRY, which was first published in 2003. I started reading it once before but had trouble following what was happening and set it aside. It's about a car accident. A police officer tries to stop a car full of teenagers, and they wind up wrapped around a tree. Three of them died, two survived. The police officer, Brooks, can't forgive himself. His work suffers, his wife leaves him. One of the survivors, Tim, lost his girlfriend, Danielle, in the accident. He's in the back seat making out with Danielle when the accident happens, but he blames himself, too. He kept telling the driver, Toe, to slow down, but he wouldn't. Toe, Marco and Danielle die. Brooks pulls Tim out of the car. Kyle lives, but he's brain damaged. Tim and Kyle still work in the local supermarket a year after the accident. Toe, Danielle, and Marco return a year later as ghosts, on Halloween yet, to torment Brooks.

Marco is telling the story for the most part, but O'Nan will switch narrators in the middle of the page sometimes or he'll flashback without setting it up. Part of the problem is that Marco is a flat character. He might as well not be in the story. It took me a while to realize it was him. There's also an element of suspense. Why do they (except for Danielle) hate Brooks when he saved Tim? It's not to hard to figure out, and I wasn't wrong.

Another element of suspense is that Tim is planning something after he gets off work. He mentions Dylan Klebald, but doing what he did doesn't really make sense. We know what he's going to do. So does Brooks, and he's constantly checking up on Tim.

Toe also has these two buddies, Greg and Travis, who want to get even with Brooks by vandalizing his house. They might as well be Beavis and Butthead. If anybody was to blame it was Toe for trying to outrun a cop.

In essence the book isn't up to O'Nan's standards. The ghost thing is hard to bring off. There's not enough of a reason for them to come back, other than that Brooks never told the whole story. His life has already been ruined due to guilt. It's like kicking a dog for peeing on the floor when you haven't trained it not to.


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The Nght Country Stewart O'Nan 9780747571742 Books Reviews

Great book. If I had one 'issue' with it, it would be that it was a little slow. However, I couldn't put it down.

The 'not being able to put it down' might more be due to the fact that it was a short novel and wanted to finish it rather than it pulling me in and not letting me go.

Good writer -- will try some of his other novels (some reviewers said this was his worst book?)
To call this a ghost story or horror story does a disservice to both the author and the work. It's like calling The Odyssey a ghost story because Odyseus speaks to the shades. Yes, there are ghosts but The Night Country aims at far more than ghost story and for the most part succeeds admirably and movingly.
The ghosts are the novel's narrators--a group of teens killed in a single-car crash exactly one year ago this Halloween (present time in the novel). Called up whenever they are thought of, this night as on many nights they follow the actions of those most deeply affected by the event the policeman who was trailing them before the crash (Brooks), the boy who survived physically but not emotionally (Tim), the boy who survived but was left brain-damaged (Kyle), and Kyle's mother, who tries to reconcile her desire to save her marriage and her responsibilities to her dependent son. One would assume the ghosts' parents would also be thinking of them, especially this night of all nights, but in one of O'Nan's many beautifully small touches, the ghost narrator tells us those will remain private.
The small town car crash, the ennui of the suburbs, the grieving mother and guilt-ridden survivor. These all could have easily fallen into the bin of cliche. They are saved from this by details such as the one above, by O'nan's wonderul array of voices, by his language which is both spare and poetic, and finally by the sheer depth of sadness in this book. The reader is sad these young kids died, but then is sad again as the narrator speaks of how already they are becoming nameless--just those "car crash kids". One first mourns the deaths, then mourns the lack of mourning. And then one mourns more for the living--for Brooks and Tim who are bound to that night and to each other and seemingly can find no way out of that endless circle. For Kyle's lost potential, though he is probably the happiest due to his brain-damaged oblivion. For Kyle's mother, who has lost both the son and the husband she had only a year earlier, for Tim's parents who take good grades and a job as the marks of recovery and don't see the train bearing down on the tracks toward them. The reader feels too for the small sadnesses, such as the principal who doesn't know how to or even whether to commemorate this day in the daily announcement. One of the many nice surprises in the book is that the reader feels more sad for the adults in the novel than the dead kids. Despite being alive, despite having lived if not full lives at least large portions of a life, or perhaps because of that, the reader feels their losses more heavily. Their reactions, their thoughts, are those of bitter experience and that lifetime experience lends a sense of weight to their grief and deprivation that outweighs the more abstract sadness over the lost "potential" of lives cut down too early.
There is an accretion of detail and sadnes and poignancy that envelops the reader, drawing them more and more into the world of the dead or the dead-in-living. Doom hangs over the novel-past, present, and future; we are told early on that Tim plans some huge memorial act and it doesn't take many pages or much hard thought to realize what it will be. Through the narrators we know Brooks and Kyle will be involved as well and like the narrators, we are mere helpless witnesses who can only go along for the ride. We want Tim to wake from his nightmare before it's too late. We want Brooks to be the hero the narrator tells us he is (though we are told he is as close as we get--fair warning). We want Kyle's mother to get smoothly through the night out with her husband. We want Kyle to recognize the faces in the photos Tim shows him. We want all the way to the end though we have a sense where all that wanting will get us. The impending doom makes this a suspense novel and the compression of time and place--a single day, a single small town--along with the spare language keep us heading forthrightly toward the disaster we are told to expect.
The book is not unremittingly sad; O'Nan leavens the tone here and there with some observational humor and on several occasions through the actions of two friends of the dead who feel obligated to memorialize them through various acts of vandalism. So there are spots of humor, but they are just that-spots, and the book remains mostly bleak.
As for the ending, without obviously saying too much, I'll say that it is unfortunately the weakest part of the book. Much of it I found simply too hard to believe--characters seemed to start to act to serve the purposes of pre-ordained plot rather than as they would have acted if just left to respond like normal (or as close as they get in this book) people. But despite the disappointment of the few closing pages, I couldn't help but be moved repeatedly by this novel and much of it will be hard to shake for some time I'm thinking. In that sense, perhaps it is a ghost story--haunting the reader who has the luck to pick it up.
And the lives altered by it. Stewart O'Nan takes the lives of all the people involved in a terrible car wreck on Halloween, puts them under a magnifying glass and forces you to watch their shattered existences play out in this brilliant novel he dedicated to Ray Bradbury-another God of the written word.

The story is told from the perspective of ghost teenagers who perished in the crash. When their loved ones think of them, which is almost all the time, they are summoned to their sides to watch on helpless, as their lives spiral out of control from losing them.

When you reach the midway point of this book, you'll think it's nothing more than a deep character study of these ruined lives, but then O'Nan takes you in a completely different direction, turning his prose into suspense, taking hold of your mind until you reach the final page.

This guy knows how to write and keep the reader wondering what the hell is going on in a good way. And as with any meaningful book, the characters in this one stay with you after the final page is turned.

The Night Country was my first O'Nan book and after turning page fifty, I got back on here fast and ordered more of his works. This isn't a bad place to start, I think.

This one will stay with you ... trust me.

Horrordude
THE LAST NIGHT AT THE LOBSTER is one of my favorite books. The Red Lobster is closing in this New England town and O'Nan follows the various characters around. Sounds dull, right? This is fiction, but these people sound a lot more real than those in most novels. Ever since I've been looking forward to his next project.

That's not the case with THE NIGHT COUNTRY, which was first published in 2003. I started reading it once before but had trouble following what was happening and set it aside. It's about a car accident. A police officer tries to stop a car full of teenagers, and they wind up wrapped around a tree. Three of them died, two survived. The police officer, Brooks, can't forgive himself. His work suffers, his wife leaves him. One of the survivors, Tim, lost his girlfriend, Danielle, in the accident. He's in the back seat making out with Danielle when the accident happens, but he blames himself, too. He kept telling the driver, Toe, to slow down, but he wouldn't. Toe, Marco and Danielle die. Brooks pulls Tim out of the car. Kyle lives, but he's brain damaged. Tim and Kyle still work in the local supermarket a year after the accident. Toe, Danielle, and Marco return a year later as ghosts, on Halloween yet, to torment Brooks.

Marco is telling the story for the most part, but O'Nan will switch narrators in the middle of the page sometimes or he'll flashback without setting it up. Part of the problem is that Marco is a flat character. He might as well not be in the story. It took me a while to realize it was him. There's also an element of suspense. Why do they (except for Danielle) hate Brooks when he saved Tim? It's not to hard to figure out, and I wasn't wrong.

Another element of suspense is that Tim is planning something after he gets off work. He mentions Dylan Klebald, but doing what he did doesn't really make sense. We know what he's going to do. So does Brooks, and he's constantly checking up on Tim.

Toe also has these two buddies, Greg and Travis, who want to get even with Brooks by vandalizing his house. They might as well be Beavis and Butthead. If anybody was to blame it was Toe for trying to outrun a cop.

In essence the book isn't up to O'Nan's standards. The ghost thing is hard to bring off. There's not enough of a reason for them to come back, other than that Brooks never told the whole story. His life has already been ruined due to guilt. It's like kicking a dog for peeing on the floor when you haven't trained it not to.