Title: Burn Our Bodies Down Author: Rory Power
Published: July 7, 2020
Genre(s): Horror
Page Count: 352
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Ever since Margot was born, it’s been just her and her mother. No answers to Margot’s questions about what came before. No history to hold on to. No relative to speak of. Just the two of them, stuck in their run-down apartment, struggling to get along.
But that’s not enough for Margot. She wants family. She wants a past. And she just found the key she needs to get it: A photograph, pointing her to a town called Phalene. Pointing her home. Only, when Margot gets there, it’s not what she bargained for.
Margot’s mother left for a reason. But was it to hide her past? Or was it to protect Margot from what’s still there?
The only thing Margot knows for sure is there’s poison in their family tree, and their roots are dug so deeply into Phalene that now that she’s there, she might never escape.
There are few things as haunted in the United States as a decaying town in the middle of Nebraska, inhabited by a jungle of cornfields and inbred white farmers. Funny how nobody ever remembers that Nebraska exists, except when something awful is happening in it. (I say this as a reluctant transplant to Nebraska, and I speak with some authority here.) So, I applaud Rory Power for expertly capturing one of the most cursed locations on the continent. Burn Our Bodies Down is a delicious and suspenseful horror novel set amongst stalks of corn and unspoken tragedies, narrated by a girl who is violently, ravenously hungry for a family.
For thirty chapters, Power takes readers on a twisting journey as protagonist Margot tries to uncover the truth—or whatever nebulous fairytale masquerades as “truth.” Where did Margot come from? What led her mother to run from home at 18 and never look back? Why is her mother so hard, so unlike every other mother? Is Margot fated to turn out the same way?
And (menacingly), why must they keep a candle burning at all times?
At the core of this book is Margot’s desperate, yet completely ordinary, desire to belong. To have a family, to understand her place in this world. The brittle relationship she has with her mother splinters across the pages. There is something so hopelessly wistful about this book, about Margot’s knowledge that, intentionally or no, her childhood has been stolen from her by her only parent. And so she sets out to rewrite her family narrative, in hopes that her grandmother will fill the empty places left by her mother’s volatile moods and stonewalling. It’s not so strange a story, at its core.
But Margot’s journey to achieve her all-too-normal goals in Burn Our Bodies Down is anything but mundane. After running away from her mother, Margot arrives at her grandmother’s home in Phalene, Nebraska, just in time to see the cornfields—her family legacy—go up in smoke. And things only get more dire from then on.
I love this book a lot, but I especially love how Power kept movement in the plot, even when it feels that the reader is never getting the answers they crave, or when the secrets hidden in Gram’s old farmhouse are too complex to untangle. Because so much of this novel is powered by Margot’s own character arc, there is consistent flow to the story. In places where perhaps the “mystery” grows stagnant, it only does so to let the main character shine.
That being said, Power does reveal the tragedy and secrets behind the fall of the Nielsen family in good time. Like any good horror novel, the truth Margot discovers is unsettling and a bit gory, written by the author in unsettling imagery that clings to readers’ minds. And because things are always more frightening when we don’t understand them, Power doesn’t burden the text with an overlengthy explanation. In Burn Our Bodies Down, the truth merely is. Margot must accept it as she can, in the same way she must accept that no amount of apologies can every fully repair her dysfunctional relationship with her mother. As she remarked: understanding something does not mean you forgive it.
In Burn Our Bodies Down, Margot comes to understand that sometimes, the best way to reckon with what came before is to move on, to create a new meaning for oneself that isn’t dependent upon blood ties or place of origin. It’s an oddly hopeful book, underneath it all. Even the biggest misery has to end someday.
…Doesn’t it?
