Hanover Square Press / July 2020
Review by: Vince A. Liaguno
There’s nothing more dangerous than a small town with big secrets. For Joel Whitley, the marvelously flawed protagonist in John Fram’s equally marvelous literary debut The Bright Lands, those secrets take a personal toll that catapults him through a propulsive, twisty sequence of events. After the disappearance of his younger brother—star quarterback of the hometown football team—forces him to return to the conservative Texas town from which he was shamefully driven a decade prior, Joel teams up with Sheriff’s Deputy Starsha Clark, for whom Joel’s return brings up her own uneasy memories of her brother who also disappeared years earlier. As the two dig deeper into the secrets running beneath the grounds of Bentley—literally and figuratively—the novel skillfully ratchets up a degree of tension that belies the fact that this is a debut novel. What follows is a tightly-written, compelling novel that’s part Varsity Blues, part <insert name of favorite Stephen King small-town evil novel here>, mixed with the sexy melodrama of an early Christopher Rice novel.
Nightmarish dreams of the titular locale and eerie whispers transition Fram’s novel from police procedural to supernatural thriller that remains anchored in the reality of human deception, addiction, homophobia, and murder. The paranormal elements—at times—seem unnecessary and leave one wondering if they were wholly essential to telling the story. For this reviewer, Fram is at his strongest when he’s shining an uncomfortable light on the generational damage and sadness of small-town high school athletics, in which testosterone-fueled adolescent boys achieve a quasi-celebrity status that never translates into adulthood for most. In Fram’s capable hands, the insularity of these dead-end towns that nurture dead-end futures for the sake of small-town pride in the athletic prowess of its young men is the real achievement here, one that imbues The Bright Lands with a pervasive sense of melancholy because we know people like these characters—narrow-focused boys who pin their futures on longshot dreams of the big leagues who become disillusioned grown men who relive their glory days in a looping reel in between menial jobs that don’t afford them one iota of the life they once dreamt of, starry-eyed and confident in their youth.
Fram perfectly captures small town ennui while illustrating how deep the darkness of corruption can run beneath the surface of Mayberry ordinariness. The theme of toxic masculinity weighs heavily here, and Fram does a respectable job exploring this modern societal problem from the perspectives of several characters, which allows him to do so with scope and breadth. There’s also a perceptive examination of the power of generational fraternity and how that power is fueled by domineering men for whom authority, influence, privilege, and entitlement can converge into a potent—and oppressive—force.
The sheer hedonism of the novel’s action-packed climax may be jarring for some. I’m hard-pressed to remember a debut novel that’s as unabashed in its queerness since Christopher Rice’s literary bow with A Density of Souls back in 2000. Fram lets loose here in the third act and shows the ugliness of sexual repression in its many forms—including adult authority figures using money, drugs, and coercion to lure underage male victims.
John Fram’s The Bright Lands is an impressive debut novel, a first-rate work of southern gothic fiction that never lets its socio-political underpinnings overwhelm the storytelling at its heart. The central mystery at its core is the book’s driving force for an overall engaging cast of characters, and Fram nails the sweltering, dust-bowl Texas setting so well that the town of Bentley becomes a key character in and of itself. An enthralling thriller with horror overtones, The Bright Lands is a harbinger of great things to come from a promising new voice in literary fiction.
Purchase The Bright Lands by John Fram here.