Ronald Malfi, Bone White
A scruffy, frostbitten mountain man wanders into a rural Alaska diner, orders a hot beverage, and casually confesses to eight murders. Then he patiently waits for the state bulls to arrive from Fairbanks. The accused’s strange confession, and the particularly gruesome murders, soon become national news, and Paul Gallo, a Maryland literature prof, recognizes the landscape where his brother disappeared. So he catches the next plane to Alaska.
I have conflicted feelings about Ronald Malfi’s thriller of isolation, atmosphere, and paranoia. On one hand, Malfi subjects his characters to innovative tortures on the perimeters of civilization, tortures which explore the characters’ depths and the extremes they’ll reach to survive. On the other hand, Malfi relies upon the Blair Witch horror model, the city-dweller’s terror at wilderness, amplified by the characters’ lack of Cub Scout-level survival skills.
Investigator Jill Ryerson of the Alaska Bureau of Investigation as seen remarkable crimes on America’s “Last Frontier.” For her, human rationality comes to the tundra to die. But even she’s shocked by the violence and rot she finds in Joseph Mallory’s isolated cabin outside Dread’s Hand, Alaska. (Yes, “Dread’s Hand.” Malfi’s symbolism isn’t light-handed.) But for all his candor, Mallory refuses to explain his motivation, leaving Ryerson even more confused.
Paul Gallo absolutely knows his twin brother is among Mallory’s victims. Danny’s last text came from Dread’s Hand, after all. Paul and Danny were Corsican twins growing up, but as adults, they’ve felt disconnected, and wandered through life seeking purpose. So Paul heads for Alaska, hoping not only for answers, but also to reconnect with the missing half of his soul. Imagine his shock when Ryerson’s investigation turns up…
Nothing.
Malfi’s story heats up in Act II, when Paul, disgusted with Ryerson’s lack of procedural headway, undertakes his own investigation. The East Coast city boy rents an SUV and heads into Alaska’s mountainous interior, and if this sounds ominous, it is. Malfi’s high-handed atmospherics really gain steam here, as Paul questions a community that’s kept secrets aggressively for generations. As often in horror fiction, local yokels are the scariest phantoms.
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| Ronald Malfi |
Simultaneously, however, Malfi relaxes into genre stereotypes. His dead-eyed provincials shouting “Y’all just git!” are pinched straight from better-known literature; James Dickey’s Deliverance, and its better-known movie adaptation, spring to mind. Malfi has described this book in interviews as his most autobiographical (I don’t know his CV, so can’t confirm). But one starts suspecting Malfi has lived much of his life through books and movies.
His worldbuilding supports this doubt. He makes fleeting mistakes about both Fairbanks and Annapolis which reveal, to those with local knowledge, that he mostly researched these locations online. So many Dread’s Hand locals warn Paul that he’s risking getting stranded all winter that, when it doesn’t happen, we’re astounded. I’m not sure whether I appreciate or loathe this subversion of Chekhov’s Gun. Maybe a hybrid.
Wilderness, for Paul (and Malfi), is metaphorical, not physical. When Paul abandons the signposts of comfortable suburban life to seek truth in the hinterlands, he abandons the comfortable presumptions which his White American upbringing bequeathed him. An AmLit professor, he’s spent his life teaching students to find truth in others’ texts. But he reaches a point where his only truth exists in places where no paths or pre-built infrastructure exist.
Which, when presented in LitCrit analysis, sounds pretty cool. But Malfi’s actual storytelling relies on mass-media depictions of country life, including crude nature demigods, crudely drawn animals, and fear of countrified superstition. One gets the feeling, reading Paul’s journey, that Malfi never took an orienteering course or camped overnight in the woods. His depictions are crude, sweeping, and stereotyped, yet somehow, Paul finds ways of surviving.
I can’t help wondering if Malfi read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, about another college-educated city boy who abandoned the map in Alaska’s wilderness, and learned the wrong lessons. Malfi seemingly believes that the physical, non-metaphorical wilderness is a place where people go to learn themselves, push their limits, and emerge transformed. Which it can be, if they take the time to prepare. But that’s not what Paul does.
The contrast is ironic. Malfi writes about a man who escapes the comfortable but stultifying confines of White modernity to discover the harsh but liberating truth. But he writes it using familiar, market-tested storytelling tropes, assembled like Lego bricks. There’s a lot I like about Malfi’s book, particularly his ambitious themes and deeper questions. But the tools he uses to address those themes and questions are just too comfy.
