KyusiReader

Question: Would you set fire to a dead author's house because you really, really, really hate his or her books? Right now, I can't think of any. Living authors, yes. I know of a lot. I can't picture myself flying off to England and then setting fire to Jane Austen's house just because I can't finish any of her novels (all those gossipy characters just drive me mad). Nor do I imagine burning Saul Bellow's house because I have all these pent-up bittnerness inside me that I'm never going to write beautiful sentences as much as he had.

Brock Clarke's An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, a superbly well-written book, is a novel that explores this issue. We meet Sam Pulsifer, a man who accidentally burned Emily Dickinson's house when he was a teenager and was sent to prison for 10 years because of this. After his time behind his bars, he builds a new life: getting a college degree, marrying a beautiful woman, having kids, living in an upper middle class neighborhood in New England, and working for a packaging company. Sam never reveals his past to his wife. But his peaceful existence is shaken when 4 other writers' homes are burned in New England, and he's the only suspect for all of them.

Now why would all these cases of arson be linked to Sam, you might ask. Well, aside from his past crime, it turns out that while he was in prison, people have written letters to him asking him to burn this and that dead author's house because these people have something against these writers. When Sam was released from prison, his father showed him the box of letters from people asking Sam to burn these houses. Now, several years later, a few of these letters are missing, and the authors' houses mentioned in these letter are being set on fire, one after another.

Based on the plot, Arsonist is a mystery, with Sam as the unwilling detective motivated to find who could possibly be framing him for these crimes. Of course, there's Thomas Coleman, the son of a couple who was killed when the Dickinson house went down. There's also his drunk mother, a character who seems so sad and angry because of Sam's father's illicit affair. One shouldn't count out Sam's wife, Anne Marie, who can be very opinionated, especially after being left in the dark of Sam's past. And there's a whole cast of other characters as well, people who have a bone to pick with Sam.

The mystery storyline in Arsonist is just secondary. Clarke's novel is a satire on the world of books, authors, writing, and the literary academe. Clarke even has included funny episodes. His black humor pokes fun at people who are so into Harry Potter and what can go horribly wrong during a book reading by a prominent author, just to name a few. One hysterically funny bit is when Sam spies on a book discussion attended by people who obviously haven't read the book but who end up discussing their personal lives.

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England is so enjoyable that it made me want to go on a tour of all the dead authors' houses in New England. (I never knew that there were that many in that area.) Read it! If you love books or are passionate about your favorite authors, you'll see yourself in the myriad of characters in the novel. Clarke's style of writing isn't straightforward. He often injects short events from Sam's past in the present narrative. The result isn't disappointing though. On the contrary, he has created very believable, three-dimensional characters in his novel.

Read this book if:

1. You read only novels by dead authors.
2. You love a well-written mystery.
3. It's been a while since a book made you laugh and cry at the same time.