Blacklands by Belinda Bauer

Blacklands is about uncomfortable subjects.  It is about a young boy searching for the bones of his long dead uncle who as a child was killed by a serial killer now in jail.  It is told from both the killer and the boy's points of view.

Steven is the boy, always digging, attempting to get away from his messy, dirty ugly home life.  He smells of mildew and his teachers hardly recognize him from one day to the next.  He is not a gifted child and hardly a loved one.

Arnold Avery is the pedophilic killer.  Locked up in jail, he relives his kills over and over again because he enjoys remembering.  He gets off on remembering.  Steven, desperate to find his uncle, finally writes to Avery and Avery writes him back.  They begin a relationship of sorts that takes a new turn when Avery discovers that Steven is a child.

The book kept me off balance.  It managed to be disturbing, funny and engrossing all at the same time.  I didn't want to laugh ever, but I was chuckling in places.  Avery is a magnetic character; so bright and so evil as well as so un-self-aware.  Just the nonchalance Bauer injects into the writing tilts things in this book.  She doesn't judge Avery, she invites us to make our own judgments about him and allows other characters to.  She lets us into his brain and even though she spares the details, it is a distressing place to be.  There are bad men ... and then there is Arnold Avery.

I don't know if I would recommend this book.  It was quite well-written.  The narrative flowed and the characters seems so real, so full of the cares that most of us feel day-to-day.  I cared for and rooted for Steven and worried for him -- even though he was fictional.  Here was a kid with the deck stacked against him.  Here was a  kid who deserved some good things in life.

I don't want to say too much more or give away the ending.  Even to say whether I liked the ending or not gives too much away.  I guess I'd say: read it.  Read this book and form your own conclusions.

You can order from Lake, Mendocino and Sonoma libraries here with your library card.

~mel