by Scott Carson ★★★★★
It's the spring of 1999, and 16-year-old Marshall Miller is on his way to the Bloomington, Indiana DMV to finally secure the key to unlock a teenager's freedom: his driver's license. After narrowly passing the written test, he's behind the wheel solo for the first time when his newfound freedom and joy evaporate in an instant. Blue and red lights flash, and within minutes of getting his license he's being pulled over by the police. Despite Marshall saying all the right things, the officer turns strangely aggressive, profane, and threatening, before eventually letting Marshall go. The officer's behavior made the encounter strange, but Marshall mostly dismisses it. That is, until a missing persons flyer shows up a few days later with a young woman's face on it, and Marshall knows exactly where he last saw her: in the back of the angry officer's squad car.
Marshall finds himself thrust into the thick of an investigation, but that investigation is not going smoothly. There's no record of the officer, "Corporal Maddox", with any Indiana police department. There are no other witnesses who saw the cop car, and no sign of the young woman. Despite significant pleas from the girl's parents and effort from the local police, no progress is being made. However, there's a private detective named Noah Storm who is determined to find the young woman, and he enlists Marshall's help for the summer.
It's fitting that Stephen King provided a jacket quote for Lost Man's Lane -- the way author Scott Carson (the pseudonym of Michael Koryta) weaves the mystical in with his mostly-reality-based story evokes echoes of King's style in that regard. As Noah Storm says at one point, "There is a reason the word 'supernatural' includes 'natural'. Any student of the world should understand that there are inexplicable occurrences. Bloomington has its share of the inexplicable, the mystical, the supernatural, if you wish to call it that." That statement is played out repeatedly throughout the novel, and there is an undercurrent of the supernatural that pulses beneath the reality of the case that Noah and Marshall are trying to solve. The opening traffic stop is not the last we see of Corporal Maddox, either. He continues to haunt Marshall and threaten him and his family, but never in a way that Marshall can document or prove.
While the plot is centered on solving the young woman's disappearance and apprehending the menacing Corporal Maddox, Lost Man's Lane is, at its heart and in its most successful parts, a coming-of-age story. Carson does a tremendous job of capturing the essence of a young man grappling with the onset of adulthood and all of the complexities and changes that brings. "Most people have no clue how badly a kid wants to be treated like an adult," Marshall says at one point, which illustrates his mindset and where he's at on his journey to adulthood. The events of Lost Man's Lane accelerate some of that journey for him, but the awkward in-between moments are some of the most poignant and well-rendered in the book.
The relationships Carson creates are truly memorable, be they between family members, romantic partners, or friends. Marshall has grown up his whole life in a single-parent household -- just him and his mom -- and she has never revealed the identity of Marshall's father. That "just us" mentality creates a fierce and beautiful bond for the two of them, but it also leaves Marshall with a gaping father-shaped hole that he unconsciously attempts to fill with a variety of male figures.
Carson also deftly captures the raging hormones and awkwardness of a teenage boy trying to figure out how to navigate romance and attraction. Whether it's the girl he has a crush on at school, or Marshall finally admitting to himself that his lifelong female best friend may be something more, the handling of teenage romance was pitch perfect. I found one passage particularly poignant on that topic:
"Many adults do not think of teenage love as a real thing. They think of it as something sweetly silly at best, or hormonal lust at worst, and they forget how authentic it is, how intensely felt. Maybe they must diminish it in this way, because how awful would it be to admit that your most unguarded, euphoric love might be behind you?"
There's a bit of everything in Lost Man's Lane -- it's a coming-of-age story centered around a mystery, that mixes in the supernatural, family bonds, friendship, teenage romance, and even a smidge (or more) of horror. I am not one to include trigger warnings, but if you have a fear of snakes, this is probably not the book for you. There's even a good amount of humor to balance some of the intensity, and several truly laugh-out-loud scenes make it one of the funniest books I read this year. There's little I can say by way of critique -- that diverse hodgepodge of components is without a weak link. Carson executes each component with precision and excellence, and he blends them together beautifully.
The Top 4 in BarlinsBooks has been unchanged for several months...until now. Lost Man's Lane is one of the best books I have read this year -- perhaps the best. Very highly recommended.
Comments