A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

I picked this up because I had enjoyed some of Hirshberg’s atmospheric short stories, like "Mr. Dark's Carnival." The first four-fifths or so of this novel, which intercuts a man’s return to the town of his childhood with the story of the fateful year when a serial child-killer called the Snowman stalked the town, had me enthralled with its narrative momentum and beautiful prose.

Then – I don’t think this is a spoiler, under the circumstances – I began to worry that Hirshberg had no intention of solving any of the fascinating mysteries he’d set up. Sure enough, he didn’t, leaving me dissatisfied and retroactively frustrated with the entire book.

I don’t think all details must be filled in and all plots must be resolved, but when a great deal of the plot of a novel depends on a mystery, I am not happy when it’s never solved. I wouldn’t mind in nonfiction, where the writer has no choice, but if Hirshberg had wanted to, he could have told us who the Snowman was and whether or not he really kidnapped one of the characters. I am not consoled by the subtext that much in life is mysterious and unknowable when it’s the author’s choice to set up a huge mystery, and the author’s choice to leave it dangling. And the very brief suggestion about what might have happened to the Snowman struck me as overreaching and unbelievable.

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The novel, though realistic, felt as if it could slip into fantasy at any moment. It reminded me of several other novels with the same general idea, of a retrospective view of a boy’s childhood in a small town in a long-lost age that isn’t really that long ago, crushes on girls, boy-boy bonding, children’s games, mysterious adults, the vivid life now lost the adult the boy became, and over all that nostalgia a terrifying looming menace: Stephen King’s It, Dan Simmons’ Summer of Night, Boy's Life by Robert McCammon, and many works by Ray Bradbury.

This seems to be almost entirely a male genre. I can only think of one book with the same mood that was written by a woman and focuses on a girl, Rumer Godden’s The Greengage Summer, and the menace in that does not loom large and periodically attack (a key feature of the other books) but rather appears out of the blue toward the end, and is also a very different and much less mythic type of menace. (A charming man who turns out to be a dangerous criminal, as opposed to a serial killer or a supernatural evil.)

I wonder if women are less drawn to the odd mixture of romanticized nostalgia and horror, or if publishers subconsciously think that’s ineluctably masculine and don’t buy such books when women write them, or what. I do notice that women seem less likely to romanticize childhood in general, however fondly they recall it, and less likely to see their childhoods as the best part of their lives. Maybe American boys have more freedom than girls, and so girls are more likely to prefer the independence they gain with adulthood to the lack of responsibility they had as children?