Author: Orson Scott Card
LOST BOYS
HarperCollins/HarperTorch Reissue Edition January 25 2005
First publication in 1992 by HarperCollins
Mass Market Paperback, 544 pages
ISBN 0061091316
$7.99 US dollars
Amazon - Barnes and Noble - BookSense - Author’s book page

As a long aside before my own actual review, I’ll lay challenges to someone else’s review, Terry L Jeffress (in the review archive at AML), faux paus though it might be, 14 years ago though it was:

Jeffress’ review

Jeffress says the ending to this story is anticlimactic. Simply put, he’s wrong. Well, except that’s his view. Except that his opinion is wrong. (I’m being facetious). Though I’m not sure what kind of ending Jeffress would have liked. An ending that erases some things that happened in the story? For those things to have never happened? The story itself hinges on matters of life beyond mortality, and the final lines of narrative boldly present the main character’s assurances of resolution that will occur in the next life. How very important is that point which Jeffress missed.

Jeffress also asserts that Card “Doesn’t introduce the suspenseful elements that play on the story’s resolution until well into the novel”. No, they were there early, along with some really great and subtly disturbing foreshadowing. Jeffress also apparently missed that.

And not enough horror? The behavior of some people in the story was quite horrific enough - and this wasn’t a gore or slasher film (I mean book - I see every scene in the book in my head though, as a film) - it was suspenseful. To complain against the book’s form one would have to complain that it isn’t suspenseful enough. And it was very suspenseful.

Lastly, I just don’t see how playing affections for children is any abuse in storytelling, and I disagree that such affections should necessarily fade for teenagers (which has nothing if little to do with this story). That complaint is really off-target. News Flash: people love children. Or they should. Children are naturally compelling. If properly portrayed. Which they were here.

Jeffress concludes by recommending the short story version of this tale. Well, good for that, at least. This story is published in Card’s short story collection book Maps in a Mirror, also in reprint by Orb Books (an imprint of Tor), published January 1, 2004. I don’t doubt the short version is also very good, though I haven’t read it, and I suspect I would end up recommending both.

Here is a favorable review I entirely agree with, by one Stephanie Name.

Now, my own review -

I give my highest recommendation to read this novel. In fact I would love to see it turned into a film. It is in turns flabbergasting and unbelievably good, harrowing and glorious. It also has some moments I thought were really darkly funny.

It tells the story of a young Mormon family that moves to North Carolina for the father’s new job programming video games (for the Commodore 64, which Card provides many authentic descriptive touches of. And from first-hand knowledge, I think. Several Christmases ago my dad bought me a Commodore off eBay - yeah, I’m a retro gamer - and one of the bonus books sold with it had a programming article written by Orson Scott Card). The boss at the father’s company and two other characters at his work provide some boggling fodder for unrelenting and unbelievably low conflict, which the father handles in ways only the rarest of men could pull off. But that ain’t all of it. There are some _nutso_ people in the local Mormon ward, and also the children’s school, who provide some outrageous antagonism, which although there was little redeeming about those characters, aside from the fact that they may not be bloodthirsty neo-Nazis, and also perhaps because these are characters any of us may have met in everyday real life - rendered to me as downright darkly comic.

Depending on your view. I know people who can hardly stomach that; making it an apparently “love it or hate it” story. Clearly I fall on the side of loving it. But the characters aren’t all either far off the deep end or upright as a Saint. There are characters anywhere between the long spectrum of crazy and sane.

Speaking of crazy, I love the grace the story lends to the theme of how indistinguishable craziness can be from religion. Well really in fact, don’t religious people believe some strictly not rational things? As an example, there is nothing logical in supposing a resurrection.

But how many outright wicked opponents can you cram into one story and have the main characters fend them off with brilliant wit, perfect justice, and without inflicting any counter-harm? I could spoil it with a more specific answer but I’ll just say that here, Card’s answer is “a lot.”

And the real heart of things comes through the children in the story, I would say especially the increasingly withdrawn oldest son in the family.

As the book’s cover blurbs and copy let on, the story is also set to a backdrop of boys in the city disappearing one by one.

I will set up expectations. When I said glorious I meant the ending, which - despite but also because of everything else that happens in the story! - left me in a blubbering and astonished stupor. I picked up several of the clues in the novel as to other happenings - which were simply rending to know without the story outright telling - but I did not see that one coming.

But do not skip ahead to read the ending of the story.

The rest of this review is spoilers unless you have read this novel.

Here’s a kid who sees ghosts and helps them solve their unresolved problems. Was that tale around before this? Because this was around before Shyamalan.

[Addendum since first write: Card says when he heard of the premise of The Sixth Sense he at first refused to see it because he realized it meant LOST BOYS could never be filmed. You know what I say to that? Rubbish! So many stories and films are so like each other but have suceeded enormously despite. The comparison will be made (in fact it could be made favorably in pitching it to producers - producers on the whole tend to only want to do something that has “already” been done! - producers do not think like audiences.) - but the comparison will be then be thrown out the window for everything else greatly different between the stories, and because your story has ten times the heart. No diss on Shymalan’s work; I love his film and it has a lot of heart. LOST BOYS has more.]

What I predicted right: Gallowglass would try to pull (successfully or not I didn’t know) something creepy, and the Butler (the landlord’s father, rather, tending the house) did the crimes. I knew Stevie’s friends were really the spirits of the lost boys. I knew the moment when Stevie disobeyed his father and didn’t come to the table when his father rushed out the door, and I knew that he then went out back and got lost like the other boys. I knew he was a ghost when his mother was trying to touch him to test his temperature, and he wouldn’t go near her. As I said, it was rending to know that while the characters didn’t. And what left me in a blubbering and astonished stupor was the fruit of Stevie’s unshaken courage.