In Silent Graves

Robert Londrigan has a promising career as TV anchorman on a midwestern local station. His wife, Denise, is pregnant, although she has already lost two children to miscarriages. This time she has made it into her sixth month. On Halloween night, a quarrel sends Londrigan out of the house, where his enjoyment of the parade of trick-or-treaters is interrupted by disturbing encounters with a old woman who merely watches him strangely and kid in a grotesque mask who accepts Londrigan's compliment by saying, "Go fuck yourself, Willie." When Londrigan returns home, Denise is losing the child. Both she and the fetus, in a visceral, horrible scene, die at hospital. While Londrigan is alone with the two corpses, the boy in what Londrigan still thinks is a mask appears, knocks him unconscious, and steals his fetal daughter's autopsied corpse.

Braunbeck has a complex story to spin for his readers. Londrigan will spend the next three hundred plus pages encountering a world parallel to our own, one populated by damaged children guarded by eternal beings, but in danger of contamination by the incursion of our everyday reality. He will also finds that he has an involvement in this alternate world he never dreamed and certainly never asked for. He will face some terrifying moments, and some rote scary bits, and come to understand much about grief, commitment, and love.

But in his first novel, originally published in 2000 as The Indifference of Heaven, Braunbeck doesn't have the narrative skills to pull all this off. Visions of this alternate world begin to come at predictable moments and take a standard form. He pesters his sentences with lists of adjectives and participial phrases that rather than adding nuance just make you wish he would make up his mind. His pop cultural references tend to fall flat. When in the alternate reality of Chiaroscuro, characters often tell stories, and the language of those stories does not lift the narrative into a different realm they way they should. They, like the book itself, go on too long. (Full disclosure: I skimmed about 100 pages in the middle of the novel.)

Braunbeck comes into his own in the final section of the story. The ending balances gory imagery with Londrigan's final acceptance of who he is and whom he has loved all his life. I felt he should have gotten their about a hundred pages sooner.