After being mentally scarred forever by Dave Eggers' monumental What Is the What, I swore I'd had enough. No more hair-raising child soldier carnage tales for me. No more mothers eating their babies, children as mine detectors, 12-year-old rapists, rivers of corpses, you know, that kind of thing.Still, his book is an artistic mountain to measure by, a stunning achievement--and all the others have created a somewhat familiar genre (They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky, Beasts of No Nation, A Long Way Gone) and now the newest entry, Chris Ajani's mercifully short descent into Nigerian hell, Song for Night.
The novella is the first-person account of a 15-year-old named My Luck who has developed an unsavory fondness for shooting people. He hasn't spoken in three years since his vocal cords were snipped by the military. He's separated from his unit of children mine detectors, and spends the entire novella searching for them, tramping through a landscape only Hieronymus Bosch could love, trying to find them. His girlfriend dies in pieces in his arms. His sadistic military commander, 16-year-old John Wayne, entertains himself with brutalities that leave the reader gasping, until My Luck shoots him, unfortunately taking out a seven-year-old girl at the same time.
As a narrative structure, Song for Night is structured like a video game. Encounters mean killing. Ajani employs some fascinating original spins, most prominently My Luck's fondness for hiding in crawlspaces and crocheting. But otherwise, this is a road trip with the grimmest companions imaginable--a teenager holding his intestines in his arms, a woman toting her own coffin.
Unfortunately, Abani not only has a gift for swift, electrifying nightmare images, he also has a propensity for corny poetic overwriting about morning dew and angels. Still, if he has first-hand knowledge of any of this human butcher shop, poor guy, I'll tip my hat to him for just getting the horrors down on paper.--Nick DiMartino