Evil lurks but suspense is lacking on trip to the past

The Shadow Year

A Novel

Jeffrey Ford

William Morrow: 290 pp., $25.95

*

FEW writers have elaborated on a genre with the brio of Jeffrey Ford. His previous books -- seven novels and two story collections -- have touched down in worlds fantastic (“The Physiognomy”), historically surreal (“The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque”) and, with his last novel, “The Girl in the Glass,” downright mysterious. A stunning portrait of oddity and murder among the Depression-era carnival class, “Girl” rightly earned the author comparison with Ray Bradbury at his creative apex. And though “The Shadow Year,” Ford’s latest novel (based on his novella, “Botch Town”), again looks to the past and contains elements of the bizarre, the results don’t reach the same lofty heights.

It begins in summer, in the 1960s. Dick Van Dyke is pratfalling across an ottoman into eternity; Mister Softee patrols the streets of Ford’s fictional Long Island town. But all is not right, of course. Nothing is ever what it seems, once you scratch the surface. And so it is for the family of the nameless narrator, retrospectively conjuring his alcoholic mother obsessed with Sherlock Holmes; his father, who works three jobs to make ends meet; his little sister, Mary, who speaks in odd voices, assumes other personalities, ruminates madly on numbers and might just have a touch of the shining; his older brother, Jim, who’s made a model of the town in the basement and spends hours watching it; and the live-in grandparents, Nan and Pop, who have secrets of their own.

Ford clearly intends to craft a bildungsroman, and the setup is perfect for the bleached-out nostalgia he does best: suburban malaise hiding unspeakable darkness. Drama leaps from the page early, as “the shrill scream of a woman . . . tore the night open wide enough for the Shadow Year to slip out.” A prowler has been seen in the neighborhood, and the narrator and his siblings decide to play amateur sleuth.

For a time, Ford achieves the velocity this novel deserves. As the prowler continues to slide through the neighborhood at night, the young protagonists plot his movements in Botch Town, the model that Jim has crafted from “coffee cans, old shoe boxes, pieces from broken appliances, Pez dispensers” and other detritus. But when Charlie Edison, a neighborhood boy, disappears and Botch Town takes on supernatural gravity via Mary’s odd powers (she knows where the bad things are, or will be), the siblings’ proclivities assume a deeper and more dangerous meaning -- particularly after a menacing figure in a white trench coat and white hat and driving a white car begins prowling too, the smell of pipe smoke in his wake.

But the novel sags under this weight, and where drama should ramp up, it softens instead. Like Bradbury’s Mr. Dark, from “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” Mr. White (as he comes to be known) is instantly recognizable as ultimate evil, and his burgeoning awareness of the narrator is meant to cause shudders. Unlike Bradbury’s creation, however, Mr. White lacks dimension. He is a faceless evil, without personality, which is curious, in light of Ford’s usual skill at creating duality in his characters -- a skill most apparent in “The Girl in the Glass” but also here in the character of the mother, who is complex, troubled and as unknowable to her children as any parent can be.

Ford seems content to fill “The Shadow Year” with stock characters, including the one character, Mary, who should be unique. But her special skills feel like a compendium of genre cliches, and that no one seems daunted by them (especially her family) is surprising, to say the least -- as, for instance, when she accurately predicts where a body will be found. It’s this lack of surprise that eventually numbs the reader, turning the drama episodic. There is ultimate evil and a prowler afoot, a child is missing, a neighbor is dead, yet too many scenes end with the narrator, bewildered and frightened, in bed, shivering until he finally falls asleep, only to wake back up in quotidian suburbia.

Setting has always played a central role in Ford’s work, and he clearly knows this yellowed glimpse of Long Island very well -- the streets, the trees, the frozen lakes all bear the imprimatur of reality. That’s what keeps you turning pages even when Ford shifts into conventional (as in convenient) horror toward the end of the novel and drama gives way to exposition. It sets up a nice twist, but because we know a retrospective narrator will survive, the author must make us fear for those unable to tell their story -- the dead, the missing, the never-to-be-found.

Perhaps if more havoc had been wreaked in “The Shadow Year,” the novel would be the better for it: The narrator (and the reader) would face a mounting emotional climax and the author would spend less time on the minutiae of this highly functional dysfunctional family and more on the darkness. At least then the reader might spend some time shivering too.

--

Tod Goldberg is the author, most recently, of the short-story collection “Simplify.”