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On the
cover of Nick Antosca's Midnight Picnic, a dog's face
seems to lunge away from the page, lit up like a creature
fleeing from headlights. The moment of trauma and suffering
this implies perfectly sums up the story about a murdered
boy named Adam, who appears to a hulking, stoic hero named
Bram. The boy wants revenge, which Bram knows nothing about.
The book might be the story of one coming to understand, empathetically,
what revenge means, but it is also other things: a ghost story
which boldly invents rules of death and the afterlife as it
goes; an extended Lynchian dream packed with creepy atmospherics;
a gripping meditation on the nature of traumatic memory.
In the
book's fantastic first scene, Bram hits a dog beloved by his
neighborhood and can't find it afterward. The next thing he
finds, in fact, is a pile of bones, which conjures up a boy
who recites, "My name is Adam Dovey. I lived at 35 Bridgewood
Road in the house with the red mailbox. Jacob Bunny drowned
me in the woods. Here are my bones." Part of the fun of reading
this book is listening to Adam, the six-year-old ghost, who
sometimes seems a little bit like Calvin from Calvin and
Hobbes, at the moments when Calvin is switching from spouting
something philosophical to imitating a dinosaur or becoming
Stupendous Man. Adam will tell Bram that his killer should
be punished and then follow this sentiment by saying, "Choo-choo."
The dialogue between the two main characters is also one of
the pleasant surprises in this otherwise deadpan, terse novel:
"I'm
hungry," Adam says.
"I don't think you're hungry," Bram says. "You're dead."
In their
journey to find Jacob Bunny and "get him," the two travel
through space in a manner that is entirely fluid: They simply
get in a car and, through Adam's power of displacement, drive
into the afterlife. This kind of effortless mutability defines
the imaginative space of the book, as does the flat affect
of the characters. Bram asks one of the characters they meet
in the afterlife what it's like, and she sighs, "Oh, I don't
know... It's like being told that it's all going to be fine
by a person who is permanently depressed."
This
depressed aspect makes it difficult to engage with the more
dynamic emotions that Bram supposedly feels—one gets
reports that he feels anger toward Adam's killer, but it feels
anything but explosive—and makes the section about Jacob
Bunny's violent life in prison fall flat. There are limits
to what this stark, despondent voice can effectively attack.
The novel
is at its most powerful when it speculates on the nature of
death and the afterlife, inventing a spirituality that feels
reasonable and familiar but also not quite like anything we've
heard before. The interesting thing is the grayness of the
world—that dead characters wander around with ones who
haven't technically died, that even the dead aren't quite
sure what happens when people die. As one dead character puts
it:
I
think that when you die you lose parts of yourself, you
erode. Pieces slough off and go somewhere else, into other
things. You can feel it happening. I think there is no...immortal
'soul.' Just something that lasts for a while as it falls
apart.
The thick,
desultory atmosphere might feel too stylized at some points,
but the upside is that it makes the story-world absolute—there
is no relief from it. This might be the scariest thing about
the book, the essential thing that all scary books need: the
conviction that, for as long as you are reading the story,
the world is inescapably dark, and all one's experiences that
would say otherwise are simply tricks or misunderstandings.
The feeling of relief on putting the book down after its satisfying
ending—of seeing that it's light out and your loved ones
are alive—is followed by a nagging feeling that one has
missed something. There might be dead people right in front
of the reader's face, in a space stained by trauma.
(May,
2009)
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