Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone by Stefan Kiesbye

Published by Penguin Books on September 25, 2012 

Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone has the flavor of a horror story, complete with the spectral creatures and gruesome events that fuel legends of the supernatural.  Yet the most compelling horror is grounded in truth rather than legend.  Stefan Kiesbye’s novel addresses the horror of spite and malice, of mob violence, of child abuse and incest, of missing children, of kids being cruel for the sake of cruelty, of friends who betray each other for selfish ends, of homeless children who die in the cold for lack of charity.  Who needs witches and werewolves when the world is filled with terrors like these?

The novel consists of a series of connected stories.  It begins with the sparsely attended funeral of Anke, the final occupant of the von Kamphoff manor in the Village of Hemmersmoor.  A widower named Christian Bobinski sets the stage with his description of Anke’s funeral.  The stories that follow are told from the perspectives of individuals who, like Christian and Anke, lived in Hemmersmoor during their childhood and adolescence.  Their stories are set in a time when concentration camps had only recently closed, when Germany was newly divided by a wall.

Ghost stories and tales of the supernatural abound in Hemmersmoor.  Horrible events have plagued the superstitious village residents -- or so the stories go -- from the heir to the von Kamphoff manor who mysteriously vanished (and is said to be wandering the manor’s hedge maze) to the miller who sold his soul to the devil after Swedish troops tortured and killed his family during the Thirty Years’ War.  Do spirits and witches really roam the village?  Is the village cursed?  Or are the gossipy, mean-spirited villagers reaping exactly what they have sown? 

Some of Hemmersmoor’s young residents are clearly disturbed, including the boy who kills his sister and the kids who dare another to jump into a hole they have cut in the frozen river.  Some are simply bewildered by the demands of dawning adulthood or by their parents’ repulsive behavior.  No matter how gruesome the stories become, it is easy to understand why these kids commit the awful acts that they confess:  they are the products of their warped environment, of people who are determined to forget their nation’s sins and to conceal their own.  Just like their parents, their lives will be dedicated to forgetting and denying.

Kiesbye’s sentences are crafted with elegant care; his prose lends power to the stories.  The characters are lively.  The story falters when it comes too close to the supernatural -- the horror of reality gives the novel a strength that is sapped by ghost stories.  Many of the living characters are virtual ghouls, the walking dead; nothing is gained by adding (for instance) the man who haunts the hedge maze.  Fortunately, those moments are infrequent.  While some are better than others, the tales of Hemmersmoor’s children are both horrendous and touching.  Given the fractured nature of the narrative, the stories cohere into a whole surprisingly well, bookended by Christian’s memories as he returns to the Hemmersmoor of his youth.  They add up to a masterful work of psychological horror.

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