World Fantasy Award 2009.
In New York's Long Island, in the unpredictable decade of the
1960s, a young boy laments the approaching close of summer and the
advent of sixth grade. Growing up in a household with an overworked
father whom he rarely sees, an alcoholic mother who paints wonderful
canvases that are never displayed, an older brother who serves as both
tormentor and protector, and a younger sister who inhabits her own
secret world, the boy takes his amusements where he can find them. Some
of his free time is spent in the basement of the family's modest home,
where he and his brother, Jim, have created Botch Town, a detailed
cardboard replica of their community, complete with clay figurines
representing friends and neighbors. And so the time passes with a
not-always-reassuring sameness — until the night a prowler is reported
stalking the neighborhood.
Appointing themselves ad hoc
investigators, the brothers set out to aid the police — while their
little sister, Mary, smokes cigarettes, speaks in other voices,
inhabits alternate personas... and, unbeknownst to her older
siblings, moves around the inanimate residents of Botch Town. But
ensuing events add a shadowy cast to the boys' night games:
disappearances, deaths, and spectral sightings capped off by the
arrival of a sinister man in a long white car trawling the neighborhood
after dark. Strangest of all is the inescapable fact that every one of
these troubling occurrences seems to correspond directly to the changes
little Mary has made to the miniature town in the basement.
Not since Ray Bradbury's classic Dandelion Wine has a novel so richly evoked the dark magic of small-town boyhood. At
once a hypnotically compelling mystery, a masterful re-creation of a
unique time and place, a celebration of youth, and a poignant and
disquieting portrait of home and family — all balancing on a razor's edge
separating reality from the unsettlingly remarkable — The Shadow Year is a monumental new work from one of contemporary fiction's most fearless and inventive artists.
