Glister
John Burnside
The children of Innertown exist in a state of suspended terror. Every year or so, a boy from their school disappears, vanishing into the wasteland of the old chemical plant. Nobody knows where these boys go, or whether they are alive or dead, and without evidence the authorities claim they are simply runaways.
The town policeman, Morrison knows otherwise. He was involved in the cover-up of one boy's murder, and he believes all the boys have been killed. Though he is seriously compromised, he would still like to find out the killer's identity.
The local children also want to know and, in their fear and frustration, they turn on Rivers, a sad fantasist and suspected paedophile living alone at the edge of the wasteland. Trapped and frightened, one of the boys, Leonard, tries to escape, taking refuge in the poisoned ruins of the old plant; there he finds another boy, who might be the missing Liam and might be a figment of his imagination. With his help, Leonard comes to understand the policeman's involvement, and exacts the necessary revenge - before following Liam into the Glister: possibly a disused chemical weapons facility, possibly a passage to the outer world.
A terrifying exploration of loss and the violence that pools under the surface of the everyday, Glister is an exquisitely written, darkly imagined novel by one of our greatest contemporary writers.
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About John Burnside
Reviews for Glister
Scotsman
Baffling, haunting, terrifying, moving, and compulsively readable
Daily Telegraph
In the end we are left with the resonance of a book whose centre is nowhere but whose circumference is extraordinarily large
Financial Times
Nobody does eerie quite like John Burnside... exquisite and haunting..... the violence in Glister is shot through with an awful grace...As with all of Burnside's work - poetry, novels and memoir - there is a vision of something inexplicable at the heart of things. I doubt I will read a more unsettling and memorable book this year
Scotland on Sunday
Darkly compelling murder mystery., the novel is also a densely layered engagement with questions of politics, spirituality, environmentalism and meta fiction. It is an incredible book; its echoes sound long after the end has been reached
Big Issue
An intersection between horror story, morality tale, feigned memoir and ecological satire
Times Literary Supplement
Tackles the question of what lies beyond with wit and subtlety
Herald
The atmosphere of Glister is sustained by Burnside's distinctive and widely praised prose style, spare but ruminative, full of ideas and unusual formulations
Irish Times
Burnside burns most brilliantly when he allows himself free rein to become a prophet of the natural sublime... The world of this chilling novel is steeped in a nature so finely drawn that it aches with its pulsing, crippled mortality
Independent
Puts him in the class of Hardy and Lawrence
The Times