There's a moment in 'Boys in the Valley' that you will not forget. This is a horror novel and it's not far into the book when evil arrives at St. Vincent's Orphanage for Boys, somewhere remote in the Pennsylvania hills soon into the twentieth century, but it takes its time and cunningly lulls us into a false sense of security. And then, when it's ready, it lets utterly loose with a brutal scene of horror that's all the more horrifying because of the participants.
You see, while this is a horror novel, the closest comparison to bring is to 'Lord of the Flies' rather than any of the more overt horror influences that are cited in the advertising. At its root, 'Lord of the Flies' was about how children would behave when shorn of adult supervision, a dark counter to the light take in Ballantyne's 'Coral Island'. This book does much the same thing in a very different setting, but adds a supernatural element to keep it genre and arguably flip the core idea onto its head.
The majority of the characters are young boys, who have lost their parents in some fashion, if they ever knew who they were, and are being brought up by priests at St. Vincent's. It's an austere life, not through any monastic discipline but simply because there isn't a lot of food and still less in the way of conveniences. They have what they need to survive and it's not a particularly bad life, but it isn't much to write home about, if any of them had a home to begin with. This is their home now, a home whose walls define their entire world.
Peter Barlow is the oldest of the children and our main focus. He loses his home at the beginning of the book, along with both his parents, but finds peace and simplicity at St. Vincent's that works for him. He also finds a father figure in Father Andrew, who guides him along the journey towards the priesthood but also takes him with him on supply runs to a nearby farm, where he falls for the farmer's daughter. For a while, this is a coming of age drama, in which we wonder whether Peter is going to choose Grace Hill or the church.
And then the local sheriff and his colleagues arrive, having broken up some sort of ritual sacrifice in the woods. They've brought his little brother Paul, who's been shot and, from our perspective, is quite clearly possessed by some sort of evil spirit. This initial scene is where 'The Exorcist' is a fair comparison, with priests facing off against a restrained Paul in bed, but we move quickly on from it because he's killed and buried and the whole affair is left in the past, with the sleeping kids not privy to what went on.
The problem, of course, is that it isn't. It's a clever ploy by Philip Fracassi to set up such an overtly supernatural explanation for everything that follows without ever confirming that it's real. We're conditioned perhaps to take it as read that, while Paul is dead and no longer a threat to anyone, a demonic evil arrived with him and remained after him, taking a boy named Bartholomew as a new host. Just like in 'Lord of the Flies', the boys split into sides, with Peter as Ralph and Bartholomew as Jack, their ensuing war responsible for a number of showpiece scenes.
But is this truly the case? If it is, then Bartholomew and those who fall under his spell can perhaps avoid any true responsibility for their actions. The demon made him do it, right? Maybe, even with such a religious backdrop as a Christian orphanage, that isn't the case. Maybe these boys are good and bad on their own merits and, like 'Lord of the Flies', just follow their own instincts. Peter is the good kid and he holds firm to his beliefs and his drive to help others. Bartholomew is merely a bad seed and he spreads his darkness to weaker-willed boys who ought to know better.
Either way, this holds back until it's ready to not hold back any more and then it unleashes a scene that will stay with me for a long time. It takes a powerful writer to unnerve a reader so much that they start to feel vulnerable and Fracassi, who has softened us up with smooth prose and subtlety, suddenly hurls us into a scene of planned but chaotic carnage that I immediately visualised in the structure of a movie. If I wasn't wrapped up warm in bed while I was reading this, I may well have started looking over my shoulder in case I was the next adult targeted.
Where we go from there, you'll need to read the book to discover, but it retains some of the power of that pivotal scene, which casts its shadow over everything that follows. It's almost traumatising in the way that we can't forget it and we quickly realise how it must make the good kids feel after it hits them just as hard as it hits us, with them just as unwary. We can roll over and go to sleep. It isn't that simple for them, as they have to figure out how to survive in a shrinking orphanage that has suddenly turned from home into prison.
This isn't Fracassi's first book but it's the first that I've read. He's written novels and short stories and screenplays, even one that's about as strikingly different from this book as can be comfortably imagined, namely 'Santa Paws 2: The Santa Pups'. Most of his work, however, seems to be in horror, and I've seen a lot of praise thrown at 'Gothic', which I should clearly check out soon. With this, he feels less like a horror writer to me and more like a general fiction writer who isn't afraid to dip a toe or three into genre territory when the story demands it. While that scene in Part 3 could be a step too far for many non-horror readers, they might appreciate everything around it.
I'd like to come back to this one in a few years and see how it plays on a second visit, without any of the surprise an initial read provides. I have a feeling I'd see things I didn't this time through, even though I caught some subtleties, such as how there really aren't any bad adults. Easily the least sympathetic character, Brother Johnson, isn't all bad, even if he used to be worse, and there are a couple of impactful scenes where we have sympathy for him and what he's put through. Fracassi is very keen to ask us to define what good and evil are and categorise what happens accordingly. It's a powerful book and it only gets more so as it runs on. It's definitely one of the horror highlights of the year. ~~ Hal C F Astell
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