Reviewed by Craig Sisterson
The town of Bentley holds two things dear: its football, and its secrets. But when star quarterback Dylan Whitley goes missing, an unremitting fear grips this remote corner of Texas.
Joel Whitley was shamed out of conservative Bentley ten years ago, and while he’s finally made a life for himself as a gay man in New York, his younger brother’s disappearance soon brings him back to a place he thought he’d escaped for good. Meanwhile, Sheriff’s Deputy Starsha Clark stayed in Bentley; Joel’s return brings back painful memories—not to mention questions—about her own missing brother. And in the high school hallways, Dylan’s friends begin to suspect that their classmates know far more than they’re telling the police. Together, these unlikely allies will stir up secrets their town has long tried to ignore, drawing the attention of dangerous men who will stop at nothing to see that their crimes stay buried.
But no one is quite prepared to face the darkness that’s begun to haunt their nightmares, whispering about a place long thought to be nothing but an urban legend: an empty night, a flicker of light on the horizon — The Bright Lands.
Some familiar tropes - a prodigal son returns home, a Texas town obsessed with high school football - are given a fresh and exciting spin in John Fram's atmospheric, deliciously disturbing debut THE BRIGHT LANDS.
Dylan Whitley is the star high school quarterback in Bentley, Texas, carrying the hopes of the small town on his sturdy shoulders. Billboards on the road into Bentley tout him as ‘the boy with the million dollar arm’. But it is a ‘rotten rind of a town’ in the eyes of Dylan’s older brother Joel, who escaped a decade before and is now living a successful, party-filled life as a gay man nearing 30 in Manhattan.
After being uncloseted and shamed out of his hometown, Joel never wants to go back to Bentley. But when a text conversation between the brothers bothers Joel, he makes a reluctant return, opening up old wounds, only for his little brother to vanish following a weekend trip to the coast with friends.
What is going on in Bentley? Sheriff’s Deputy Starsha Clark knows all too well the pain of a missing brother. Dylan isn’t the first Bentley Bison football player to disappear. Troy Clark was never found. An uneasy pairing, given they dated in high school and all that’s happened since, Joel and Starsha search for the truth behind Dylan’s disappearance, poking into the town’s dark secrets only to find a nest of rattlesnakes in human form, mean and deadly, and something that may be beyond understanding.
With THE BRIGHT LANDS, Fram announces himself as a tremendous new voice in thriller writing. There’s poetry in his prose, and he expertly weaves in queer issues and Gothic sensibilities into his small-town noir. The dash of supernatural doesn’t overwhelm – it’s finely balanced and fitting ala the thriller novels of Michael Koryta and John Connolly.
This is an excellent tale soaked in atmosphere, that takes readers into some disturbing places as it examines small-town life and queer experiences in rural America, and explores a variety of perspectives on the tensions and toxicity that can hide within high school sport. The literary equivalent of a quarterback throwing for five touchdowns on debut, or a rugby player scoring five tries.
John Fram is a writer to watch, and more importantly to read. Highly recommended.
Craig Sisterson is a lawyer turned features writer from New Zealand, now living in London. He has been a judge of the Ned Kelly Awards and the McIlvanney Prize, and is founder of the Ngaio Marsh Awards and co-founder of Rotorua Noir. His first non-fiction book, SOUTHERN CROSS CRIME, was published in 2020. You can heckle him on Twitter.
No comments:
Post a Comment