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Drowned Boy
The reader shares an affinity with Nate Holland, the younger brother of Donnie Holland, the just-outside-of-control prime mover in Gabriel’s first story here, “Boys Industrial School.” When the story opens, the two are standing in the road, talking with a police officer about a boy who’s run away from what serves as juvie in their rural Ohio town. Donnie, 12, and five years Nate’s senior, later claims to know where the runaway is and takes his brother on an hours-long hike to find him. The whole thing shakes Nate, who nervously picks along behind his brother, amazed at his worldliness and befuddled by his lack of fear. For Nate, there’s something dangerous always lurking. For Donnie, the unknown equals adventure.
Like Nate, we have to tread carefully through Gabriel’s linked stories, because we don’t know what’s coming, but it can’t be good. Donnie and Nate eventually find the kid on the lam and show him the way to their home. But then, that night, Donnie disappears for two days.
Gabriel connects all of these stories through location, anchoring them to the lone highway or the river that run through Moraine, Ohio. Though characters sometimes cross over, themes always do, largely a sense of impending or resonating tragedy, as in the titular novella at the heart of the book. Nate makes another appearance, along with Samantha Longstreth, both struggling with the death of a classmate. Gabriel doesn’t rest on the tragedy of the premise; instead, he gives us two characters confused by death, even in some ways attracted to its mystery. It’s a nuanced and complicated examination of the way grief is contagious, sparking dark emotions in people who initially are barely affected. And like Nate, the reader is trying to figure it all out.
Gabriel reads Friday 19 at the Book Cellar.
