Junior takes Dino out of the facility for a day trip and sets out to perform the same ritual that their father attempted many years ago. Dino now lives in a residential facility, and Junior is the father of a son who has died. The book then does a time jump, many years into the future.

I also hated the implication that abled-ness is related to the possession of a kind of “life force,” and that the extraction of such life force would lead to disabled-ness. As far as the reader is able to tell, he is a saintly innocent, acted upon by parties of varying good (Junior) and bad (his father, prejudiced kids at his school) intentions. I was, let’s say, uneasy with the book at this point: We have no sense of Dino’s interiority. Dino’s worsening seizures are a result of this vampiric effort by Junior’s late father. He believes that his father is coming back to help him and Dino, and that there may be some way to help his father cross back over the border between life and death.Īs Junior investigates what’s going on with his father’s ghost, however, he begins to realize that his father is actually draining Dino of life in order to cross back into life himself. Junior’s father is dead, but he thinks that he sees the ghost of his father in his house. (Assume there will be spoilers throughout.) The protagonist’s younger brother Dino 1 has intellectual and physical disabilities, and his seizures have recently been getting more severe.

Cover of Stephen Graham Jones’s Mapping the Interior

The silent companions review