Mapping the Interior
By: Stephen Graham Jones / Narrated By: Eric G. Dove
Length: 2 hrs and 10 mins
Mightily creepy! But once again? Ya just canNOT trust a Publisher’s Summary
Whatthehell IS the Publishers Summary talking about?!? And why oh why did I read it cuz it has NOTHING, not even the boy’s age, right!
Let’s start with our narrator, who is a TWELVE year-old boy, and not a fifteen year-old. It takes us quite some time in this superbly written novella to discover that this kid is one incredibly mind-flipped poor thing. I’m not used to unreliable narrators, have a tendency of taking everything a character tells us as being the absolute God’s honest Truth, thereby not thinking much more about it, but here? Oh my goodness!
Mapping the Interior is the PERfect segue between October 31st’s Halloween and November 1st’s beginning of Native American Heritage Month. Dunno who, exactly, is the twisted ghost, the demonic monster. Pretty sure that I’m not going to be the only one who goes in rooting for the boy (Who’s never really named), coming out? Well, I can’t quite tell you because there’d be some pretty major spoilers.
We’ll just go with a young boy believes he sees the ghost of his long-dead (Drowned under mysterious circumstances) father decked out in the man’s native dancing regalia. The man is walking the just-one-step-above poverty modular house, and the boy believes Dad is there to help save younger brother, Dino. We’re not sure why Dino’s such a mess, but it’s kinda thrown out there that Mom swears she didn’t drink while she was pregnant with the little boy. Dino has delays, can’t really learn, suffers seizures, and eats part of his superhero toy figurine, setting up a whole HOST of nightmarish things to come. Namely, the appearance of Dad.
But as time goes on, our hero starts seeing Dad’s appearances as perhaps blood and vitality-sucking interludes that are bringing him back into a living corporeal being. And our hero becomes mightily afraid and will do anything to save the entire family before Dad sucks the Life right outta them and goes on to another part of the state to start a new life with new, not so broken, sons.
And it’s lines like: Not so broken, that make this a real heartbreaker of a story. Because the family’s a mess. And were our hero not around? Well, he’s not around all the time, and Dino comes home from school, tormented by classmates, tormented by everyone on the bus. He’s different; he’s broken. As is our hero, whose actions become increasingly terrifying and erratic as the story progresses. Throw in a neighbor with an ax to grind, and you’ve got a creeper of a story.
At first I didn’t get into Eric G. Dove’s performance as, even though I understood this to be a tale of a man looking back, it just seemed that he sounded waaaay toooo old to carry off a young boy’s story. But then we got to the horror show end with ITS major twist, and I thought: Ahhhhh, now I get it. And BOY!!! Twisted! Yes, Dove fits the mold of an older man utilizing lessons learned.
Enjoy Mapping the Interior now as neat Native American writing with all its themes, but do indeed enjoy it next Halloween as quite simply one of the ickiest and most twisted little gems out there.
Publishers Summary be damned!
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