ROTTERS
by Daniel Kraus
Delacorte Press (Random House), 2011
Young Adult
448 Pages
Amazing. This was misfiled with the zombie books. There is none of the supernatural in it, it’s all about a boy’s journey of discovery (please forgive that cliché,) after he loses his mother and must re-create himself in a world where he is at the bottom of the food chain. People seem to love it or hate it, but with an open mind, even someone who dislikes the horror genre might enjoy Rotters greatly. I’d even put it on the shelf next to Skellig.
I found the prologue confusing. Joey Crouch is thinking back to the day when his mom died, and in a reverie, he imagines all the small accidents that could have happened, each little thing that could easily have taken her life that day instead of what actually did, a city bus. Later in the book you realize it was part of something Joey calls “specifying,” an autistic trait where he enters a mental state akin to a detailed photographic memory.
After the intro, the book starts out in first gear, but steadily gains momentum. I got sucked into the characters and the mystery of Joey’s dad like it was a Hitchcock suspense thriller.
This book has the potential to change your outlook on life. It makes you think about what it’s like to be on the bottom strata of society, about the existential equality of all people given the return to dust that we must eventually face, about change and tradition, family and friendship, wealth and true worth. The idea of a fall into poverty through no choice or actions of your own makes you re-think, how do people end up there? What if -I- just happened to “fall through a crack”?
Joey meets his father for the first time as soon as he walks alone to his house from the train station, lugging his gear the entire way. Then his old man takes off for three days, leaving him to fend for himself in a tiny shack with no bed and no food.
The next morning he walks to school even though he has no books yet, because– well, it’s what you’re supposed to do. Go to school. Joey encounters both his main tormentor and his major crush the first day. (Why do they always fall for the popular, pretty cheerleader? Just once, I’d like a character who would automatically judge the queen-bee as out of his class and look to the dark-haired nerdy girl.)
Anyway, that’s where the punishment begins. Joey’s dad is “The Garbage Man” who never picks up anyone’s trash, the town pariah who eternally smells of the charnel house. This makes Joey the instant target of the school bully, Woody Trask.
Eventually he meets a kindred outcast named Foley, who advises him to be as invisible to his bullies as possible, to “become oblivion,” and then introduces him to heavy metal. (This is another great bit of research by the author who does a fantastic job of covering, on only two pages, the history of metal like it was a VH1 Classic documentary.)
If you are into “new metal”, check out Vorvolakas here:
Overcome with curiosity, and partially in an attempt to blackmail his father, Kenny Harnett, into becoming a better father, Joey eventually follows his dad to see what exactly he does on his sometimes week-long disappearances. It isn’t something he would have expected in a million years. He finds his dad, shovel in hand, robbing a grave. But it isn’t long before he asks to join him and learn about his unique “trade.”
The complaint as to the scarcity of bodies for dissection is as old as the history of anatomy itself.
Meanwhile the bullying continues at school, and Joey loses his best friend from his former life. (I thank the author for showing me it wasn’t just my rural high school that was like this.) With this loss, the old Joey is completely gone, only “Crotch” remains.
While forcing Joey to build some digging muscles, Harnett mentions how grave-robbers handle their own in cases of indiscretion (buried alive) and the key to handling it (C-A-S), then the author makes us wait for it– causing me to wonder, how does a grave-robber get “jumped in?” In fact, the book explores a lot of facts you may have wondered about but were afraid to ask, on topics like the decomposition of bodies, the choice of materials for the manufacture of coffins, and scented graveyard fertilizers.
He gestured at one of the crypts. ‘They’re usually not worth the effort. You chip a lot of cement and bend a lot of iron and break a lot of glass. There’s no time to repair that kind of mess, and that’s the most important thing, kid, the most important thing of all: never let them know you were there.’
As if all this wasn’t interesting enough, Herrick takes Joey to a grave-robber convention. There is a cemetery relocation (yes, they really do that, just like in Poltergeist,) and we find a remarkable scene where the old-timers recount their achievements and losses and give Joey some of the history of their long tradition. Joey finds pride discovering that his father (known as The Resurrectionist”) is held in high regard by this elite clique, and he learns a bit more about his dad’s mysterious past.
These characters are so intriguing, have so much potential, they shouldn’t be limited to a single book. I need a short story starring Crying John and Fouler.
There is this guy named Boggs that Joey is warned away from, someone from both his father and mother’s past, and soon enough, he shows.
What’s the point, Kenny, seriously now, of a diamond, which is designed to reflect light… what’s the point if there ain’t no light to reflect? You and me can steal that ring, sure, but that doesn’t get down to the real issue, now, does it? Brother– you know I know you know it.
The problem is that Boggs has a strange personality where he always craves just a little too much attention. So he’s making this book. Of Polaroids. For every photograph he takes, he takes two; one for the book, and one for the model. Which eventually is going to be a problem for every one of the diggers.
The diggers will often name their shovels, when the harmony, the synchronicity with the body is there, and Boggs has a beautiful Egyptian shovel named Harpakhrad.
Harpkhrad meant “Horus the child” and he was also seen as a baby at the breast or as a naked infant sitting in the lap of his mother Isis. Another depiction shows him as an infant boy with big, innocent eyes, engaged in sucking his finger.
There are a few incongruous details that I let slip. I think people, at least somebody, would have recognized just what that smell was emanating from Harnett and Joey’s jackets. We’ve all smelled animals that crawled under the barn to die. I think Celeste would have checked the audience before going out to dance, too.
The book starts to slip in its believability toward the end, which it was meticulously careful about in the first half. (Digging twenty-one graves in a night and filling them in again is a bit much even for my suspension-of-disbelief. I’ve dug graves for cats and dogs myself, and there’s just no way, even if it is pre-dug soil.)
The story drags a bit here as Joey makes a dubious moral choice to follow the increasingly drug-crazed Boggs for a while and learn what he can from him. Not that he doesn’t pay for it, but Joey goes too far when he not only allows but helps in profaning the other diggers. Then the loose ends are tied up all too abruptly in comparison with the previous pace of the story.
In the end, Joey is left with no more or less than any of us rotters can hope for. We are witness to the end of a long tradition, a way of life given up to a world of video cameras and backhoes, moral questions left unanswered as they always ultimately are.
I have to say this is the best book of any genre I’ve read in years. The reference on the cover said it should be read twice. Let me add: At least. I’ll be re-reading it many times because the story will be around for a while. It’s one of the incorruptibles.
The fence was classic nightmare: lustrous, bladed wrought iron, taller than me. This is where ninety-nine percent turn back, my father told me: Halloween pranksters, homeless addicts, amateurs giddy with fantasies of gravestones used as coffee tables and skulls as bongs. The fence, said my father, is teeth to a mouth.
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What happens to Harpakhrad? Does Joey keep it, sell it, bury it?? I listened to the book on CD, and it’s too hard to find such details, even though I did listen to the end twice.
**SPOILER**
I also had to go back and re-read the ending to answer that question in my own mind. I think the author obscured it intentionally, so as to leave the future open to possibilities.
We last see Harpakhrad sticking out of Harnett’s chest, but on the next page, Joey says he buries Harnett’s body. I have to assume it was with the use of the shovel. We never hear of it again.
Joey feels an affinity with a shovel on the last page, even thinks he has a name for it. (Living in New York, I never quite understood the whole clearing snow with a soil shovel thing, but I’ve seen it often in the South.) I like to imagine that he has it wrapped in velvet somewhere. Joey -did- say he’d never leave anything of value in Harnett’s grave, since anything that can be buried can be uncovered again. But I wonder.
When I put the question to the author, Daniel Kraus, his response was: “Read Trollhunters. That’s all I’m saying.”
From Trollhunters: “More empty beer bottles that I’d ever seen had been tossed next to a concrete wall covered in graffiti: demonic beings that bore resemblance to ARRRGH!!!, as well as nonsensical yet ominous declarations like Harpakhrad Lives!“