Brother Book Review

Brother by Ania Ahlborn (2015) is one hell of a wild rollercoaster ride of a horror novel. It's darker than most Stephen King stories. Much darker, actually. Murder, dismemberment, incest, necrophilia cannibalism... So on the surface, it might remind many of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But it's not filled with cheap thrills. That's because it is in part Southern Gothic. And given the extraordinary exploration of family dynamics, you might even say it's Faulknerian.

What drew me in was the setting: an isolated small family farm in rural West Virginia, my home state. Unlike most horror stories, this one is not told from the point of view of the victims. We get to know and understand the perpetrators, and that makes it all the more unsettling.

In 1980, Michael, the protagonist, is a 19-year-old young man. So he and I are pretty close in age. Michael is just a few years older than me. He has a mother and father and a brother and sister. But Michael feels like an outsider, and he's beginning to dream of escape. Michael seems like a kindhearted boy. It's easy to like Michael. But from an early age, he has been forced to take part in his family's gruesome hobby. They capture, torture, kill and eat young women.

Michael knows what he and his family does is wrong. The screams of the young women haunt him. You might wonder why he doesn't simply leave. It's not like he's a little kid anymore. Plenty of young people his age go out into the world on their own. But Michael has never gone to school. He's never known anyone other than his family. And the only time he goes out is with his brother in search of new victims and to shoplift. It's been drilled into Michael that he owes his family everything. His brother fills his head with ideas about how the two of them must look out for each other. And if Michael isn't there to help satisfy his family's needs, Mama might turn her sights on his sister. The five of them are held together on that farm, and they work together as a killing machine.

The story gets going when Michael and his brother start spending time at a record store in town. Alice is one of the clerks. She is a fellow teenager, and they hit it off. Alice thinks Michael is sweet and mysterious. She quickly picks up on the fact that Michael doesn't know much about the world around him. Michael wears a t-shirt with a picture of David Bowie on it, but when he admits he doesn't know who David Bowie is, the shirt is just something he picked up in a thrift store, Alice says he's like an alien from Mars. She takes him to McDonald's and his first movie: The Shining. And she introduces him to contemporary music. Alice also talks about her dream of getting out of West Virginia and moving to New York to become a newspaper cartoonist.

Michael is soon smitten, but he knows Alice would find him disgusting if she knew what he's done. And he's desperate to keep her away from his family.

What we learn in the last part of the novel is shocking beyond belief. Tragic and perfect.