It took Alan Garner years before he turned out a sequel to wrap up the story he began in Weirdstone of Brisingamen and Moon of Gomrath. Despite my distrust of authors returning to their long-ago early successes I’ve been thinking of reading the sequel; my library doesn’t have it but searching the website turned up Garner’s 2021 novella, THE TREACLE WALKER. Reading it was ninety minutes of my life I’ll never get back.
We open with Joseph, a young farmboy in the 1930s or 1940s, lying at home with a patch over one eye to strengthen the other “lazy” eye. Treacle Walker, the rag and bone man in the neighborhood shows up and suddenly we’re immersed in a strange series of weird, surreal events. Joseph barters with Treacle Walker for a magic stone, discovers his covered eye can see things that aren’t there, falls into a comic strip and talks to a dead man buried in the nearby bog. Which is material that should add up to a fascinating story, but doesn’t. There is no plot to hold everything together, making it just a string of weird, unexplained events. It’s also way too heavy on dialog with minimal detail on setting which as with Owl Service makes it harder to figure out what the heck is going on. I’m baffled by the tons of critical acclaim this got.
THE GIRLS: An All-American Town, a Predatory Doctor, and the Untold Story of the Gymnasts Who Brought Him Down by Abigail Pesta looks at the story of Larry Nassar — a respected doctor who molested hundreds of gymnasts brought to him for help with their injuries — through the stories of some of his victims, from one who may have been his first target through to one of the last one. Pesta shows how Nassar groomed his targets, won over their parents and thrived despite repeated complaints to police, Michigan State University (he was a sports doctor there for years) and gymnastic bodies. In most cases it doesn’t appear there was a coordinated cover-up, just the ubiquity of rape culture: either the gymnasts weren’t believed or the people they reported to didn’t want to rock the boat by confronting someone so respected. The result, of course, was that Nassar operated for years longer; the fact he molested so many girls worked in his favor as many victims assumed his vaginal and anal “treatment” must be legit — all the patients they talked to had been through it. Horrible stuff but a good book.
Cover by Jack Gaughan, all rights to image remain with current holders.
