The Hawley Book of the Dead: Frustrating

The Hawley Book of the Dead by Chrysler Szarlan

The Hawley Book of the Dead is a debut novel by Chrysler Szarlan, a bookseller from Massachusetts. It follows the story of Revelation Dyer, a Las Vegas stage magician with a real magical talent: the ability to disappear. At the beginning of the story, she accidentally kills her husband, shooting him on stage in a Bullet Catch illusion that goes wrong. Once Reve realizes that the murder was no accident but planned by a mysterious person targeting her and her family, she moves with her three daughters to Massachusetts, her home state. The Dyer women settle in Hawley Five Corners, a small abandoned town connected with Reve’s family’s history. She begins to puzzle out the entangled mysteries behind her murderous stalker, her family’s secretive past, and her own unfolding magical powers.

Doesn’t that sound awesome? Even as I write out the summary, I get excited again for such a cool premise. An abandoned New England town? A family’s secret history, held in a magical book? Murder on the Las Vegas stage? Unfortunately, the execution didn’t work for me. I found myself constantly frustrated by this book, even as I kept reading to find out the end.

I’ll start with what worked. The beginning is great. “On the day I killed my husband, the scent of lilacs startled me awake.” As a hook, that is excellent and evocative. I was generally impressed with Szarlan’s prose. It was clean, simple, unornamented, with moments of poetic illumination. It felt literary, which is a style I favor in fantasy.

And the setting Szarlan describes is marvelous. Hawley Five Corners was abandoned in the twenties, but many of the houses and buildings have somehow remained untouched by time. As a girl, Reve and her childhood best friend, Jolon, used to ride their horses through the woods to explore it. Now, living there, Reve is surrounded by eerie coincidences and suspicious neighbors who mistrust anyone living within the bounds of the abandoned town.

However, The Hawley Book of the Dead does not balance all of its plot elements very well. Not only is there Reve’s on-going story in the foreground, but there is also a shadowy magician whose connection with the Dyer family is not thoroughly explained or wrapped up.  But he’s too heavily referenced to really be background material. Furthermore, as motivation for Reve’s murderous stalker, Szarlan adds another story of an underground government bunker where magical creatures are tested and tortured. Szarlan plans to write a series, which is great. She obviously has plenty of material for it. However, this first book may not have been the place to explore all of these storylines. Don’t get me wrong; I’m a big fan of seeding in plot elements early for foreshadowing. But a writer has to strike a balance between what is foreground material and what is background. Szarlan’s balance was off, and so the disparate plot elements ended up competing with each other instead of supporting the main plot.

I also didn’t think all of the plot elements in the main plot were necessary. Why was the family secret, about their magical ability, kept a secret from Reve at all? [Here’s a spoiler: highlight if you want to read it] The grandmother, Nan, eventually tells her the whole story, which also clears up the mystery of the abandoned town. But the reason Reve didn’t grow up knowing this is that Nan had put a spell on her daughter, Reve’s mother, to keep her from talking about it. Why? No real reason is given. And Reve’s dad is not under the spell, so he can talk about the family secret all he wants. I guess Nan just trusts him? [end spoiler] Needless to say, this explanation is unfulfilling and too easy to poke holes in. It seemed like a shoehorned solution to a story problem that didn’t really need to exist in the first place. After all, watching Reve’s daughters learn about the family magic for the first time would have been just as fulfilling as watching Reve learn about it.

Finally, I felt very unconnected to Reve. Her grief at her husband’s death was glossed over too often; ultimately, she felt wooden. Later on, [Another spoiler] when two of her daughter are kidnapped, [end spoiler] she turns into a caricature of desperation, with too much whining to be likeable. We are supposed to be impressed with her fortitude, but instead she lashes out at everyone around her, blaming them for not fixing the problem.

Some of the marketing that accompanies this book compares it to the recent Deborah Harkness books. On Goodreads, there are lots of outraged commenters saying what a travesty the comparison is, how Harkness is a goddess and Szarlan could never reach her lofty level of literary accomplishment. But, honestly? I found them about the same: frustrating reads with confusing, overpacked plots and unlikeable, unconvincing characters, and yet, somehow, just enough underlying mystery and fascination to keep me coming back for more.