The main character of this novel, like the main character in Evenson's first book of fiction, The Father of Lies, is haunted by a demonic friend. In The Father, the friend is presented as a spirit or dead man; in any case his body is cooked and flayed. His name is "Bloody-head." But in The Open Curtain, the friend is not presented as a dead man, but the real half-brother of the main character, Rudd, a Mormon-raised teenager living in Utah. The friend's name is Lael, similar to Leland, the demonically possessed character in the Twin Peaks series who kills a young woman and whose name is similar to Woland, a literary name for the devil. The importance of this association is that it perhaps reveals the reason why Evenson presented his demon character as an ordinary American boy, albeit a decidedly violent, malevolent one, a sort of twisted Tom Sawyer, instead of a demon less vulnerable, like "Bloody-head." For in the novel, Evenson draws upon historical, whether real or imaginary, newspaper sources as a stimuli for violence, as a maddengingly unclear confusion between past and present.
But then what are these sources? They are murders, supposedly committed by the grandson of the famous Mormon leader, Brigham Young, and an unknown, perhaps fabricated associate of his.
The novel is also about memory, or the loss thereof, for the main character, Rudd, for the more he associates himself with his crazy half-brother, Lael, the more he has blackouts. And it is with these continuing blackouts that Rudd increasingly feels a sense of unreality and a certain power or knowledge of what to do just about beyond his reach, as well as an unusual ability, or subjectivity, as it were, of seeing whatever he is thinking in all the writing he reads, including textbooks.
I will not reveal much more about the book, except to say, that as a person raised in the Mormon territory of Southern Idaho, I can appreciate much of the scenery, the sets and schemes for Evenson's novel. For example, the town of Springville, where much of the action is set, is a place my Mormon grandmother lived during the last years of her life. It is also a place I traversed with this same grandmother with my mother back from a mostly Mormon family reunion in Arizona, and it is there, in the car, in a food cart of a mall, that she continually submitted to the scariest of panic attacks.
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