The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford

 

I read this last night but am only getting around to posting it this afternoon; I have no excuses or jokes to make about that, oops. This is a novel I've had around for a while, probably one of the first times I read a *bildungsroman* that I knew what it was (and the word for it). It's a decently creepy novel, honestly more what I thought Perotta's *Ghost Town* was going to be (but wasn't) though it's set in the mid-1960s, not the early-mid-1970s, and the POV is younger--there's less in the way of drug use, what's there is mostly alcohol (and mostly a parent being/getting drunk, and therefore secondhand, and the POV's mom is an alcoholic, which is portrayed as bad). There's also actual tension, though the novel does tend toward the episodic/picaresque; the bad thing/s happening in the suburb are real and bad. There's a strong whiff of the supernatural, a ghost experience, but the evil in the neighborhood is very definitely human, though that human does seem to have some preternatural stuff going on. The mundane stuff going on the POV's life in parallel--family and school and neighborhood kids--serves as a pretty effective counterpoint to the Boy Detective/ghost story threads; it never felt as though things weren't moving on multiple levels. The denouement is sorta bittersweet and wistful, laden with the idea that there are things we leave behind when we leave childhood, and maybe sometimes doing that makes us less than we were. I bought this about when it came out (published in 2008) and I'm sure I read it about then, I'm glad I reread it, it's really good.