Children of the Dark, by Jonathan Janz

It all began with a baseball game.


This is how the novel Children of the Night by Jonathan Janz starts out. Not, as he says, with blood, monsters, or a sadistic serial killer—the death of seventeen people to which Will Burgess, our narrator, is a witness, is but a far off foreshadow. No. It all began with a baseball game, says Janz, and in saying so, he has opened up a world built of horrors.

When a novel is written from the perspective of a teenager, and especially when writing in the first person, as Janz does here, there are expectations. Can the author keep up a consistent style and voice—can he maintain a teenager’s perspective throughout the text? And, even if he can, if you were to hand the book over to a teenager, would that teenager look at you, smile politely, saying thank you, and then take the book back to his friends to show them how little adults know about their own inner worlds? Or would he or she relate to the Will Burgess? Would he or she say, ‘yeah, that’s how it is’? These are questions that I am happy to answer, because Janz scores on all counts, as far as I’m concerned.

Will Burgess is your untypical teenager, born into a broken home and forced to care for his little sister, aptly named ‘Peach’. He has a group of friends, a group of enemies, and, of course, a pretty serious crush on a grade-school sweetheart turned heart-throb. Mia has friends, too, and so begins the strange teenage-tunnel-of-love that seemed so serious to all of us back in those days, right? All of this dodges what has become a typical scene, though, because Janz is writing of a generation that will find themselves one day termed millennials (and thank goodness Janz is an author who waxes nostalgic over movies like The Silence of the Lambs and novels by Stephen King—this is the real deal, folks, the stuff us millennials grew up with). The novel progresses into terror territory (heh-heh), when a serial killer breaks loose, and when strange things start happening in Savage Hollow, the forest that surrounds the Burgess residence. There’s something out there, something …

… evil.

What cause’s seventeen people to die before Will’s eyes, you ask?

I say: read and find out.

Oh, and, sure, there are some typical troubles involved with the novel—there are times when you feel as though the kid relating the tale is recognizing his actions and their consequences as an adult would, and not as a teenager might. There are times where moral judgments are made, where it appears that an adult author is speaking through a teenager to teenagers, instead of taking staying true to a teenager’s perspective. But Will, our main character, borders adulthood, anyway, what with his wreck of a home life, having to care for his little sister due to his dead-beat mother, and it is in this reviewer’s opinion that what appears to be lapse is no lapse at all. It is a device used to focus in on a detail that makes the character more real, more alive. It can be distracting, sure, and, at times, Janz toes the would-a-teen-really-think-that line, but I believe a Janz-lapse is rare—and the goodies in between these minor thought-breaks are far too tasty to pass up.

Another semi-critical note: this has less to do with Janz and more to do with printing of the novel I received in purchase. The alignment of the pages are to the left, instead of justified text (the edges of the paragraphs on the right side are not ram-rod straight, in other words). This is an odd feature that reminds me too much of free-verse poetry. The function of this could be to speed the pace of the novel, but if that is the purpose, it doesn’t work. The narrative is chopped up, instead, and it hurts to be ripped out of a world built by an author due to no fault of his own.

But, printing presentation aside, the most important question for the adult reader of this novel is straight forward. Can a novel, written from the perspective of a teenager, be of any interest to an adult reader?

Janz did his homework on this; there are quotes in the beginning from two texts, Stephen King’s The Body, and Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. Each are related to in the text, both on purpose and indirectly (because Janz is fan, too, as are we all), and that makes it a treat. Janz dedicates his book to his son. I have an idea that a lot of personal experience went into the crafting of this novel; the kind of experience only a father could have. You can tell that Janz has been to the realistic world he paints, both as a father, as a fan of prior works relating to his subject, and, obviously, as he was a teenager once himself. Janz has come back to us to tell of it. That sets the groundwork for a good tale of the supernatural, and there is no lack of imagination in this novel. I am confident that both a young-adult and an adult-adult can find something to love about the book. I did. Those children of the dark are sure to stay with me for some time to come, and the ending—well, after seeing seventeen people die, what kind of mind-mush would you expect to be left with?


Review by David M. Wilson