Fans of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time or his many works for children might be startled by The Pier Falls--it's as far away from a children's book as one could get. A collection of short stories that begins with a minute-by-minute breakdown of a fatal disaster, The Pier Falls takes a series of cold, hard looks at the darkness in human existence.
Haddon's goal here is not to provide comfort or distraction, but to plunge readers into the most uncomfortable aspects of life. In the aforementioned opening story, an unnamed narrator watches as dozens of people fall to their deaths when a pier on the English coast collapses. Another tale imagines a doomed group of astronauts, set to live the rest of their days on Mars with no hope of rescue. Another follows a similar band of explorers in an unnamed jungle as nature takes them, one by one.
It would be easy to write off The Pier Falls as a nihilistic slog, but that's a reductive criticism. Yes, the book is emotionally brutal, and most certainly nihilistic. But, like the provocative films of directors Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke, it is a masterful look into how easily what little meaning we have can be destroyed. It will probably make readers squirm as they consider their own lives, but isn't that what good art should do? --Noah Cruickshank, marketing manager, Open Books, Chicago, Ill.