Stephen Dobyns's The Burn Palace begins early in a late October morning in the small town of Brewster, R.I. As most of the town sleeps, we see Nurse Spandax rushing to the nursery after an illicit sexual encounter with Dr. Balfour. A newborn boy is missing, replaced by a "huge snake with red and yellow stripes." She screams.
"Now, like an airborne camera," Dobyns writes, "we move back from the hospital," and meet the town's residents. Among them are Ernest Hartmann, a visiting insurance investigator; Larry Rodman, who collects rings, "one of the perks of working at the Burn Palace," as Brewster residents call the local crematorium; Vicki Lefebvre, whose daughter is also missing; Sheriff Woody Potter, off to investigate the babynapping; and 10-year old Hercel McCarty Jr., who can do "things" and whose pet snake is missing. Hercel's afraid of his stepdad, Carl, who has something in his gut trying to "break free."
Things slowly begin happening, like the way one character speaks: "the words percolated into his head like water seeping into clay." While visiting an Indian burial ground, Hartmann is stabbed and scalped by a man without a face. There's talk of Wiccans and witches, and the mother of the missing baby says she was impregnated by devils. Nurse Spandax goes missing. Coyotes are gathering around town. Carl, hearing voices, has taken to growling and staring at knotholes in his bedroom.
Dobyns weaves a huge, seamless tapestry of a narrative, unfolding a suspenseful, eerie tale of a town caught up in a spell ripped from a Nathaniel Hawthorne story. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher