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Your Children All Gone (2012) - Simon - 12-19-2025
Even though this takes place in Germany I'm sticking it my 'true-grit' (aka fucked up white trash) shelf. I guess America doesn't have a monopoly on twisted Appalachia type folks, although there is an element of old-world charm here that is generally missing from my dentally impaired and radially excelled countrymen and women.
The book opens in the modern day. A guy returns to his hometown after years away to find it being overrun by yuppie types, but with some of his old friends still making up part of the local color. A girl he knew growing up has died and he and three of his friends are the only people who go to her funeral. The funeral ends, like any good funeral should, with one of the mourners lifting up her dress, showing everyone she isn't wearing any knickers and pissing on the grave. There is then a minor physical altercation. You'd almost think this was taking place in Ireland instead of Germany with these kinds of goings-ons.
The book then jumps back forty years or so to give a series of chapters that each tell a different story about the town and children growing up there. The chapters are told from the point of view of the different kids who would be taking part in this funeral, either as the mourners or as the stiff.
After the first couple of chapters you start to catch on to the idea that none of these stories are going to end well. Not that the kids are going to come to a bad end necessarily, but that something fucked up is going to happen to someone in each of the chapters.
The book straddles the line of being super-natural, but you never really know, and I think you get the feeling that there is nothing super-natural going on except that some backward ignorant types take some refuge in believing in ghosts and curses and things like that instead of facing up to the fact that the whole town is a bunch of borderline psychopaths. Just look at the matter of fact way that the Thanksgiving contest is told in one of the first chapters and the almost flippant way it's mentioned in some later stories.
The book is blurbed with nods to Shirley Jackson (which is a code word for "The Lottery", which is really the only Shirley Jackson story that anyone ever means when they say Shirley Jackson) and Stephen King's "Children of the Corn". The first allusion has some validity. The second is nonsense, but it goes well with the creepy kid on the cover of the book. These aren't stories of weird kids holding a town captive with the terroristic antics of scary pre-pubescents, it's a story of a fucked up town, just told from the perspective of a group of kids. If you had to relate this novel to a Stephen King work, "The Body" would probably be a better one, but without any of the heart-felt nostalgia (or maybe that is just in the movie, I've only read the story once, but seen the movie many times so my memory isn't necessarily good here).
Grumbling about the blurbs though is just about the only thing I can complain about for this book. For a two-hundred page book there is a high density of fucked up things going on, but it never felt like I was being hit over the head with shocking scenes over and over again, but now that I'm thinking of all the things that this book had in it I'm fairly amazed it was all able to fit into a satisfying short novel.