Scott at The Fat Guy recently asked me for some book recomendations. He was more interested in scifi than anything else, and I gave him a bunch of those, but this small-town horror tale by Stefan Kiesbye also is a winner.
I picked up on it from PJMedia’s Andrew Klaven and decided to give it a try through the Kindle sample at Amazon. I was immediately hooked by the seemingly-effortless writing style and the surprise of a character literally peeing on a grave after a funeral.
It’s a coming-of-age tale about a post-WWII German village’s adolescents whose parents and peers brutalize each other so casually that none of it rings false. Sounds awful? All of that sneaks up on you, actually, and by the time it makes its appearance you’re already invested in the story and the characters. It is far less violent than many other novels these days, thanks to Kiesbye’s clever choice of words.
It helps if you know German so you realize the English meaning of some of the place names, but it’s not strictly necessary. Haunting, Klaven calls it, and I agree. I’m still thinking about it, three books later.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 