"The Night Strangers" by Chris Bohjalian

(Crown, October 2011, 375 pp., $25.00, ISBN:9780307394996, HC, Fic) 


"What do these women whose names belong in a garden want from you? Do they want anything, anything at all?" (226)


I know what I want - a story that lives up to its promises of haunted basements, green thumbed witches, traumatized twins and psychotic caregivers. "Night Strangers" has it all, but does it deliver? 


Chip Linton is not Chesley Sullenberger. Thirty-nine of his passengers are dead due to a botched water-landing after his plane collides with a flock of geese. He is not a 'Hero of a the Hudson', but a failed pilot who carries the souls of the dead on his conscience. Three in particular will not leave him alone, and their ghosts have followed him to northern New Hampshire where he has moved with his wife and children to start anew. Something in his new home is giving shape to these ghosts, and it lies behind a door in his cellar with thirty-nine bolts. 


His wife, Emily, and their twin daughters are having difficulties of their own. Chip is detached, and his bouts of PSD are driving him further away from the family and reality. Can a group of herbalists help them to establish a new life out of the wreckage? And why should the herbalists with their green houses and exotic tinctures feel so invested in this family's well-being? Why are they especially so interested in the twins?


Bohjalian balances the presence of two stand alone stories expertly and finds a way to weave them together, starting off slowly at first, and building tension half-way through. What begins as a ghost story turns into a complex psychological thriller that leaves the reader guessing who - or what - is real. A paranoia sets in that pits the reader against the town, and then the family themselves. I love this kind of mystery, and if it were not for the changing narration styles and myriad characters coming in and out of the picture, this could easily have been a top pick for the year. 


The major hole for this novel has nothing to do with plot, but a bad editorial decision. Chip Linton's character tells his story through second-person narration. I have unpleasant memories of my English teacher berating me in junior high for daring to put "you" in a business letter. She was right though - under no circumstance does "you" belong in anything but a conversation. Bohjalian uses it through half the book, and I found myself re-reading many passages to fully understand what the main character was trying to say. A reader should never have to re-read a passage unless she knows it's going to be on a test! I was ready to throw the book down by page fifty I was so confused. Switching back and forth between third and second person is a no-no and I'm sorry the editor did not catch this and convince the author to change the style. It disrupted the flow of a great story from start to finish. 


The number of characters also took away from the story. Much like Tolstoy's "War and Peace", I felt I needed to write down the names of each person on an index card to keep track! Maybe if the characters were not named from the book of plant taxonomy. What is harder to remember? Anna Mikhaylovna Drubetskaya or Yarrow Collier?


The saving grace for this novel is Bohjalian's expert research. I greatly enjoy the small passages he writes that describe the most intimate thoughts and actions of characters while performing difficult techniques in gardening or flying. In one such passage, the author describes how Chip feels when flying above the clouds:


"Their exquisite polar flatness: fields of pillowy snow that stretched to the horizon. As the shadow of your plane would pass over them, you would imagine you were gazing down on an arctic, alabaster plain, and in your mind you could see yourself crossing them alone in a hooded parka and boots." (209)


Once again Chris Bohjalian presents us with a fun weekend thriller. If the reader is patient enough to get past a slow first half and the presence of two narration techniques, then they will be rewarded with a satisfying psychological thriller.  


3 out of 5 stars. 

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