While browsing at the bookstore, I picked up the sequel to this book first. Imagine my surprise to find that there was nearly fifty years between the writing of book one (Origin) and book two (Wrath). For that reason alone, I had to read them.
West Condon. 1960s. Church Sundays and beers on the front porch. Italian immigrants and casual misogyny. Highschoolers making it in the back of cars. I was born in the mid-80s, twenty years after this book was set yet it’s remarkable how familiar the working class family community of West Condon feels. Shit I’ve completely forgotten about. The bad: men calling women “broads” or anti-Italian slurs. The good: a greater awareness and understanding of changing seasons, the smells, tastes, fresh spring sun on your skin. It was strange, unsettling.
The first 80ish pages of The Origin of the Brunists is a harrowing account of a mining disaster. Starting with miners filing into work for the night shift, taking the elevator down to the mine, and unbeknownst to them, their doom. I was again struck by familiarity. I worked the night shift for years, in a warehouse loading trucks. OK, maybe I’m dramatizing by comparing that to descending into the bowels of the earth, obliterating my lungs, and putting my life on the line daily, but still. I did almost drop a carburetor on my foot once.
Anyway, the shifting-point of views that demonstrate daily life in the mine and then the terrible disaster that rips it apart and kills ninety seven men is the best part of the novel. It can’t be overstated how miserable the role of a miner is whether it be 1966 or 2018. The novel flounders for a bit, following the disaster, is at its worst for 50-100 pages before it picks up the main thrust of the plot: Giovanni Bruno, the sole survivor of those trapped in the mine, is rescued and an emergent cult forms around the few words he can manage to dislodge from his oxygen-starved brain.
Origin feels like a proto-Stephen King novel. You know those books that flit between a dozen or more townspeople, immerse us deeply in their point of view, then move on to the next person, often displaying a contradictory angle to the person before? Needful Things, Under the Dome, etc. It’s a similar set-up here, except instead of greed and devilry, the town is afflicted by economic depression and religious mania. A specter hovers behind the Brunists. While the mine disaster is behind their rise in the most obvious sense (Bruno himself), it’s the economic and social reality behind it that truly drives it. Mining is a very dangerous job, but in some locations it’s just about the only job. Most of the early adopters of Bruno’s cult are widowed by the disaster or facing no prospects following the mine’s closure. It’s a search for answers/solace/community and especially meaning and closure that creates the Brunists, a cult slash religion that is absolutely sure the world will end soon. It didn’t end this weekend? OK, it’s for sure going to end next weekend.
I liked this book a great deal. It didn’t completely blow me away, but the town felt so grounded that even had I not already become intrigued by the fifty year gap between them, I’d be reading the sequel. There’s a solidity to the prose that’s difficult to describe. West Condon happened. I need to know the next chapter.
The Scrying Orb 