By Susie Moloney
Bastion Falls was on my list for years. I only heard about it years after it was published (back in 1995) and was intrigued by its premise -- like a Canadian take on a Stephen King story. The only description I had was “town trapped in snowstorm w/ psychic teen girl”.
Recently, while perusing Abe Books, I found a copy of Bastion Falls for only a few bucks. It came with my first order (along with St.Lucy’s Home for Girls) and I only realized it was a mass produced paperback after I opened the box. Inside the back page was a library slip from Eagle Nest Public Library, N.M. with three sign-outs in 2001, 2003 and 2016. On Goodreads, Bastion Falls had only 78 ratings and 9 reviews. This was obviously a pretty obscure find, so I was prepared to be disappointed.
There were northern towns just like Bastion, and yet Bastion stood alone among them. It had in its earlier days a harder edge, a meaner desperation, a need for the fulfillment of some kind of darker order.
Things change; in that Bastion was no exception. The years piled on years brought it an air of civility that was inevitable. Its past was buried with the ruins of the old fort. What remains of the fort, in irony, are only its walls, the bastions.
When a freak September storm envelops the town in snow, strange things start to occur in Bastion, but no one is able to trace it back to the old fort site. That is, no one except a teenaged girl named Shandy.
The strangest thing about the fort was that no one ever went to see it: there were no field trips to study Bastion heritage, no commemorative dates to mark on the calendar, no Familis of the Fort to celebrate. People around Bastion almost pretended the fort didn’t exist. They never denied it was there, and it was brought up, duly, during local history cases, but there was an unspoken agreement that the history of the fort was not up for public view or scrutiny. It had seemed a town eccentricity, and before today Shandy had never questioned it, it having never been important. But it’s important now.
In recent years, a “mall-like” complex was built in the town centre, constructed out of “good old Bastion Falls limestone” and providing an epicentre for the inhabitants to gather. The public school and bar were also part of the complex. When the blizzard descends upon Bastion, many people stayed inside the mall to wait out the storm and pretty soon the mall became a refuge centre.
When running late for work, Marilyn got caught in the sudden blizzard, but made it to safety and took refuge inside the mall. The same morning, Shandy was pressured by her boyfriend to skip school so they could hang out, but she was reluctant to because of the approaching storm. She relented, and unfortunately, later witnessed her boyfriend overtaken by an unknown entity.
In the corner of his mouth, for just a second, Shandy saw a black tail-like thing, attached to something bigger, but like a shadow. It moved down his throat to the center of him, she followed it with her eyes as it moved into his chest.
It reversed. The swell disappeared.
“David?” she whispered.
David’s body shrunk into itself, the blood disappearing from his flesh leaving it the color of corn husks, the flesh shrunken.
Shandy is the psychic teenage. Through her abilities, she sensed that the source of the entities originated from the old fort site and comes to the realization that she must destroy it.
Somewhere up around the old fort site. That was where it was coming from. Whatever it was that was happening. (Something to do with the storm, the storm and those things.). That was where she had to go. Shandy knew this, the same way she always knew.
When Marilyn finally met Shandy and saw how determined she was to set off on her suicidal mission, she went with her and helped Shandy set fire to the fort.
There were some obvious flaws with the plotline and which ‘genre’ this work of fiction wanted to fit into. But I was pleasantly surprised to find the quality of the writing quite solid. There was care and detail in describing the town of Bastion Falls and its various inhabitants.
Like Candace Bergen, the new principal of Bastion Falls Composite Highschool and “by Bastion standards, the most progressive principal the town had ever known… But by standards formed by the rest of the liberal world, she was conservative to the highest degree." In describing her personality and dedication to her role, Moloney also painted a general picture of the student body, where chronic truancy, teen pregnancies, substance abuse and dropout rates were relatively high.
Another interesting character was Joe Nashkawa, mall manager. “Besides running the mall, Joe was chief o the Bastion Volunteer Fire Brigade; in the winter he coached the under-six hockey team, the only team to play inside the rec center’ and he was a band elder…”
And then there was Emma, the cheatin’ stay-at-home mom, who killed time by having serial affairs, her latest being occasional handyman and closet toxic male, Tully.
She sometimes thought of divorce, and then having all the affairs she wanted, but she did love Don—it wasn’t anything personal—and hadn’t loved any of the others. She had hardly even liked any of the others. They simply were a part of that other life, add a lift to her day. Her days were desperately lift-less, and her affairs were very, very important to her in their own right. She wouldn’t give it up, didn’t even want to think about it, even though she did, every single morning when the before of it all was happening and the excitement high and her genitals were throbbing and all of it overwhelming her. She simply could not help herself.
It looked like Emma was gonna get punished for her sins when her lover didn’t handle being dumped well. Her being trapped by Tully the Unhinged Handyman was probably the most tense part of the novel. When the entities got him, it was pretty satisfying to read.
Last but not least, there was Ed, the manager of the bar that also provided a safe haven for the locals to take refuge and drown their boredom.
Just about all his regulars were there, having been in for most of the day. But a lot of folks were people he hardly ever saw, the twice-a-month folks, the once-in-a-while folks, some of them were in the bar. Most of those folks had come in out of the storm for refuge and found it in booze. There was no helping that: he couldn’t exactly start throwing people out into the worst storm he’d seen in years… Therein lay the problem. What was he going to do with all these people?
It looked like Moloney was going to build up to a big massacre or showdown between the townsfolk and the mysterious entities. I mean, that’s what Stephen King would’ve done. Despite all the care and attention that Moloney put into the setting and disparate characters, it never all quite gelled together into a gripping cohesive narrative. Oddly enough, the only character who was sparse on background and detail was Marilyn, the young divorcee who ended up helping Shandy defeat the entities and save Bastion. For someone who was the sole remaining witness to what went down at the old fort site, we didn’t know much about her, yet Moloney devoted so many pages to the other side characters, like Emma and Candace, that had nothing to do with the main plotline.
When
Marilyn and Shandy finally met, it felt kind of rushed considering all the time
spend developing the other characters. What’s
more, their attempt to burn down the fort (“fire cleanses”) was somewhat
laughable, as Shandy only packed several cans of lighter fluid in her knapsack. Shandy somehow holds back the demonic entities with her
mind while Marilyn sets the fort ablaze in a snowstorm with those cans of lighter
fluid. But it really seemed like they
needed something with more oomph, like gallons of gasoline and/or a flame thrower!
It was pretty miraculous that two ordinary people were able to defeat a legion of supernatural, soul-sucking entities with a few cans of lighter fluid and the whole thing was disappointingly anti-climactic. Shandy even died an unsung hero, with the people of Bastion unaware of her sacrifice. Only Marilyn knew what really happened.
The stones were black with soot, and more of the limestone bricks that had held such misery had fallen over. The acrid smell of smoke was still there, and under it the smell of the lighter fluid. It truly looked like ruins now. Marilyn thought it looked harmless. She knew it felt harmless. Her amazement at the place was mostly because she didn’t feel much changed from that night. She felt no ghosts at her side; her mother didn’t come to her in dreams. She was herself again. The aches were gone. There were no echoes in her head. There seemed no aftermath, except that some people had died; many that she knew, one that she felt responsibility for, even if she’d tried.
Despite it’s anti-climactic-ness, I still found Bastion Falls a low-key page-turner, which makes it very Canadian. Yet the novel is written in a way that doesn’t point out how Canadian it is. We know that Bastion Falls is a northern prairie town, but which province, it didn’t really matter. There were clues though, like when Joe always had his radio tuned to CBC, “the only station he would play in the office, damn the others all to hell if they wanted to listen to their shit-kicker music, he liked his news.”
Moloney also sidesteps any explanation regarding the supernatural forces. Were they pre-colonial? Did early European settles massacre a First Nations village? Was the fort built over some ancient burial site? Stephen King would’ve delved into the origins a little, but Moloney is no Stephen King.
Still,
Bastion Falls made for a good winter holiday read while I was staying at the
in-laws. Thanks to Abe Books, I'm glad I finally got to read it, but unfortunately, it ain't a keeper.
