Trigger warnings for homophobia and bullying.
When someone is convicted of a crime, those of us who aren’t affected generally consider the matter closed. We don’t usually think about the environment that the criminal grew up in unless it’s particularly awful. We pay more attention to the victims and their families, but most true crime or mysteries don’t follow the ripples out from a crime to the community at large. Michael Bible’s novel, The Ancient Hours, is all about the ripples. Chapters from different perspectives show us a terrible crime from the perspectives of peers, witnesses, the criminal, and the victims. The emphasis is not on the gruesome details. Rather, the emphasis is on the links that bind all of these voices together.
I can’t say that Iggy was always going to do what he did. I can say that I can see what led Iggy towards that day in the church, when he set it on fire and killed twenty-five people. In the first chapters, we meet a man who is the target of compulsive bullying by his peers and who, when he falls in love with another boy, has his chance at happiness ripped away. We don’t learn too much about the motives of the people who destroy Iggy. Instead, I got the impression of a boy who was never going to fit in with a small, rural, Christian community. People bully him because they can’t seem to help it. Worse is when the father of the boy Iggy loves, Paul, decides to send Paul to a residential camp. Nothing goes right for Iggy after that point. When he goes to the church, we know that Iggy doesn’t have mass murder on his mind but what happens when he lights the gasoline transforms Iggy from the town’s whipping boy to the universe’s thing to kick around.
The rest of The Ancient Hours turns to a witness, a bystander, and a survivor to add to our understanding of Iggy and his crime. It’s hard to know where our sympathies should go, given how much we know about Iggy’s treatment at the hands of his community. On the other hand, the witness’s account reveals the terror people must have felt in the church as it started to burn. From the bystander and the survivor, we see how Iggy’s story becomes local legend.
The Ancient Hours moves fast and we readers are left to draw our own meaning from the various accounts, to piece together what the overall message might be. I feel like there’s a lot more subtext than actual text here. Some readers might enjoy the challenge of pulling meaning out of The Ancient Hours but the whole book felt thin to me. The pace rushes along so quickly—except for the chapter from Iggy’s perspective—that I don’t think the community and many of the characters are fully realized. I wish that there had been more text for me to settle into, to get more of a sense of Iggy’s community. That said, it’s possible that I’m misreading this book. I’d be curious to know what other readers thing.