WAIT UNTIL TWILIGHT by Sang Pak (Harper 2009)

(Okay, first, just ignore that T-word in the title. No relation whatsoever.)

This isn't the kind of book I would have chosen off-the-shelf at Barnes & Noble. When author Sang Pak offered me a review copy and described it as,

a coming-of-age/southern gothic novel about a motherless teenage boy who discovers a terrifying secret in his small Georgia town, and finds that sometimes the most gruesome monsters are those inside ourselves.

. . . I really wasn't sure it would fit well with my tastes. I went through my "southern gothic" phase back in college, and got it pretty well out of my system then. The "coming-of-age" label concerned me even more, as I find such stories tend to be "literary" in all the ways I find most annoying, with levels of narcissism ranging from subtle undercurrent to raging torrent. That the teenage first-person protagonist's name is "Sam Polk" really alarmed me on this score. And then as I started reading, well . . . I have to agree with Ian Chipman's Booklist review quoted at Amazon, that it "opens hesitantly."

But I'm glad I stuck with it, because once it hit me with the first major shock, it hooked me in a big, bad way. The "hesitant" opening is the journey of Sam and one of his friends to a spooky old house in a poor neighborhood. Sam has a video project to complete for a class, and David has a distant and indirect friend-of-the-family connection with the woman who lives in the house. What makes her interesting and a potential subject for the video project are her unusual baby triplets, who she claims were immaculately conceived (it's a southern gothic, so I hope it's not too much of a spoiler when I say, you know what that means). How unusual are they? The "little miracles" are so gruesomely deformed that the instant Sam lays eyes on them, he runs outside and vomits.

After I finished the first chapter, I had to set the book aside to run some errands, and I realized it had gotten under my skin when I kept thinking about those babies. Since I couldn't stop thinking about them, it rang totally true, once I resumed reading, that Sam became preoccupied with intrusive thoughts and feelings about them. At first, he makes himself watch the snippet of video footage David managed to capture of them before the insulted woman told them to go away. He works up the nerve to go back and apologize to the woman and ask to see the babies again.

A sinister man begins to haunt the margins of Sam's life. This guy turns out to be the woman's adult son. Wow, he is one vicious, violent motherfucker, and a couple of scenes featuring him are truly nasty and upsetting.

Two things particularly impressed me about this novel.

First, it's relatively short and quite a quick read, and yet a great deal of richness about Sam gets packed in very economically. Besides the main plot thread about the babies, we see Sam deal with school, friends, work, his creative aspirations, the loss of his mother a year ago, the distance between himself and his father and his older brother, and his emerging adolescent sexuality (here it gets a little Marty Stu-ish, as every girl responds to him very positively, in ways he sometimes seems oblivious to). What's most impressive about all this is the way it comes across not as so many different plot strands but as a single life. Pak doesn't just skillfully weave it together, but infuses it with a deep integrity I haven't often seen even from more experienced, established writers.

Then, being "southern gothic," this novel has a lot of unusual details, characters, and scenes that are unsettling in one way or another. I've complained before that this sort of thing too often comes across as an ad hoc piling on of weird and creepy details, but Pak really gets it right and brings an impressive coherence to it all. What holds it all together, ultimately, is the way Sam processes these experiences. Specifically, he draws lessons and resources from them that help him deal with the extreme situations arising on the main plot thread. A lot of writers telegraph this sort of thing in a way that feels artificial--it's easy to see that such-and-such experience is a key, and it's not too hard to recognize it when they come to the door that key unlocks. Here, Sam is forced to scrounge inside himself for whatever he can find to meet extreme demands, these weird experiences are what he has to work with, so he mines them for meaning, and in his desperation finds insights that aren't immediately apparent but that nevertheless ring true. Now, there are some "here's a key" moments, such as when one of his brother's more streetwise friends tells him,

"Samuel, just remember, if you ever get in a fight, just keep getting back up and fighting, even if they're dragging you all around the parking lot bleeding and screaming. You keep fighting; they'll give up. That means you win."

But the other cases I describe make even these seem a lot more organic and natural, and not so plot-pointish. It works.

As I said, this book is quite a ways off my beaten paths, but having read it, I'm really glad I went there. Heck, I'll probably read it again to study how Pak pulls some of this stuff off. Highly recommended!