Darkness’s Little Brother

Ania Ahlborn, Brother

Michael Morrow tries to keep his morals intact, despite the violence around him. It’s been no easy task: he grew up in a family of serial killers. But a chance encounter introduces him to Alice, a beautiful, free-spirited artist who reawakens the spark in Michael’s soul. For the first time in his short adult life, Alice gives Michael permission to dream. But are his dreams ultimately doomed, given the number of deaths in which Michael has been complicit?

Ania Ahlborn pinches a storyline familiar from slasher movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes: the rusticated hillbilly clan that torments pretty people who wander into their territory. But Ahlborn subverts the genre by telling the story from the killers’ perspective. She unpacks the morals driving some of literature’s most seemingly amoral characters. And she suggests that the monsters may not torment outsiders half as much as they torture one another.

Michael’s brother's real name is Ray, but he wants everyone to call him Rebel. Only Michael is cowed enough to do so. Rebel, along with Momma and daddy Wade, does the actual killing, but they make Michael clean the messes left behind. Even worse, they make Michael’s sister Misty Dawn watch. Through the slow torture of complicity, the Morrows leave Michael with one driving motivation: don’t let the family sickness rub off on Misty Dawn.

Rebel finds constant ways to torture Michael. For one, he ensures Michael never learns to drive, or holds an adult job, keeping him dependent on Rebel to experience the outside world. He forces Michael to shoplift the liquor Rebel uses to quiet his inner torment. Michael has adapted to Rebel’s constant petty torments to survive. Considering how the alternative is collapse, keeping his head down works pretty well.

In flashbacks, we catch glimpses of the Morrows’ life before Michael was old enough to remember. They reveal Ray’s sensitive, emotional childhood, and his devotion to another sister, Lauralynn. What happened, we’re left to wonder, that Lauralynn isn’t in the present? These flashbacks demonstrate the moral complexity beneath the family’s violence. Rebel is sadistic, but deeply lonely. Michael is sweet-hearted, but complicit.

Ania Ahlborn

Alice, the pretty bohemian record-store clerk, gives Michael his first glimpse of a world not circumscribed by murder. She’s beautiful and artistic, but bored by small-town life. Music liberates her soul, and when she loans Michael a treasured 45, he experiences the same liberty. But it comes with a price. Leaving the Morrow farm means leaving Misty Dawn, another musical spirit, at the mercy of a family that murders pure-hearted young women.

Ahlborn plays with genre convention throughout this book. Her inspiration is clearly slasher movies, so reviewing this book in movie terms is justified. Ebert’s Law of Economy of Characters tells us that every character introduced by name and/or dialog serves a narrative purpose. Our role as audience is only to ascertain what that purpose is. Briefly, the answer is, more than I, an admittedly jaded reader and cinephile, anticipated.

The characters make occasional reference to God and religion; Rebel in particular compares himself to a vengeful deity. But this book is completely secular. Notwithstanding that, Ahlborn teases out themes of free will and determinism that even the characters themselves glimpse fleetingly. At what point, Ahlborn asks, does Michael stop being a victim of the Morrows’ evil, and become part of it?

This novel is packed with nuance and shadows. No moment of character or dialog is wasted. If Ahlborn's characters glimpse a daisy in passing, we’ll ultimately see someone important pushing it up. The cascade of moments accelerates until we reach a climax so fraught that, while reading it, my hands literally shook. I don’t rattle easily at mere prose, folks. The fact that this book exhausted my emotions testifies to its dense, well-constructed impact.

It’s hard not to feel for Michael. Presumably, few of us came from hillbilly murderer clans, but we all have ways we feel our families are weird. We’ve all experienced that moment we believed the right person could deliver us from that weirdness… and that moment when we absolutely believed we squandered our chance.

That’s what makes the tortures Michael faces so gut-wrenching. Because he is us, with the choices we all whiffed, and the trail of loved ones we’ve left hurting behind us. Michael’s pain is our pain. And, like Michael, we’re left with the consequences of the choices we could’ve made, but we never knew we had the choice until just too late.