Mark conliffe
Reading the opening pages of Adrianne Harun’s wonderful first novel, A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain, we might feel that we are beginning a simple tale of good versus evil.
The action takes place in a town on B.C.’s notorious Highway of Tears, where so many — mostly aboriginal — women have gone missing. To most readers this setting might create an uneasy feeling: horrible expectation that another woman will vanish can appear alongside restorative hope that the killers will be caught. Similarly, we might put its main characters into two distinct camps; in one camp would be five close friends — late teens who shoot rats and “crap crows” at the dump for fun, but who are joined by their commitment to family, each other, and the town’s weakest residents. The other camp wold be made up of a small but potent collection of nasties — a meth lab boss, who drugs and abuses townsfolk, and his “private posse of goons,” who troll the town, tormenting young people.
Harun takes these easy divisions and places them in a world that is honest about human shortcomings and virtues. She asks us to think hard about dynamics and forces that make people behave as they do, but she adds a twist. Specifically, might the Devil have a say in why people do things, and what about the Snow Woman who lures children up into the mountains?
It’s through the words and actions of Leo Kreutzer, one of the five teens and the novel’s narrator, that these dynamics and forces are channelled. He tells of one friend’s inexplicable attraction to “a man in green plaid undershorts sitting cross-legged on the sour carpet in front of a spread of playing cards” and of another’s choosing the company of a newcomer over her friends and “disappearing up the gravel trail” just off the highway. In these instances Harun leaves us to wonder about the forces that cause the friends to make their choices.
Leo is also the re-teller of stories that his dying Uncle Lud shares with him, stories that bring together the likes of the Snow Woman, an uncanny sense of what will happen in the teens’ near future, and Leo’s mother’s caution to him that “these stories aren’t yours to keep, no matter what Lud says. It’s too much.” And, this “too much” might echo our feelings, too, that in this novel some dynamics and some forces can’t be named because they can’t be known.
In the hands of Adrianne Harun these dynamics and forces enliven a world that is at once brutal and beautiful, stark and enchanting, physical and spiritual.
