A review by space_and_sorcery
December Park by Ronald Malfi

adventurous dark emotional mysterious tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

 

After my positive encounters with Ronald Malfi’s Black Mouth, Come With Me and Ghostwritten I was eager to explore more of his works and settled on December Park, which promised to mix a coming of age story with a murder mystery focused on a serial killer.  Unfortunately something must have been wrong with the blender, so to speak, because this novel did not totally work its magic on me this time. 

 

December Park is set in the early ’90s in the small town of Harting Farms, on the Eastern Coast of the USA: Angelo and his friends Peter, Michael and Scott are looking forward to the end of school and to a summer of freedom, but when children start disappearing and one girl is found dead in a local park, a shadow falls over the town.  As the abductor/killer, soon nicknamed the Piper, keeps going on undisturbed and the police seems to flounder in the absence of clues as to his identity or the fate of the missing kids, Angelo and Co., together with Adrian, a boy who came to live in Harting Farms only recently, decide to hunt for clues on their own and to uncover the Piper’s identity.  What begins almost as a lark becomes increasingly risky as the five boys’ search moves to dangerous grounds and turns from the initial adventure into a potentially deadly obsession. 

 

Let’s start with what worked for me, and worked well: December Park is, first and foremost, a coming of age story, and as such it portrays very well the journey these five sixteen-years-old kids undertake on this fateful summer.  Told from Angelo’s point of view (one that for several reasons makes me think there is something of the author in his characterization), it shows the mix of childish impulses and yearning for adulthood that’s typical of their age. These are basically good kids despite a few “sins” like covertly smoking or enjoying Halloween pranks: the bond of friendship between them, which later on includes newcomer Adrian who is a somewhat weird kid, is a solid one and one of the best elements of the story, made even more real by the delightful banter that peppers their exchanges. I enjoyed seeing how they, bit by bit, manage to bring Adrian out of his shell and how he responds to them: being the newcomer and a solitary soul, he might have been the perfect target for scorn or abuse, but they bring him into their orbit and after a while he even becomes the main drive behind their search for the Piper.  The atmosphere of a small, quiet town that still harbors a few secrets, and a few unsavory characters - like the older boy who loves to bully younger kids - is also rendered very well. 

 

It’s intriguing to observe how the dread that falls over Harting Farms manages to keep young people and their parents apart: there is a certain sense of resignation, for want of a better word, in the way the adult population reacts to the disappearances; even Angelo’s father, who is a detective and therefore active in the investigation, looks more dejected than anything else. For their part the young people, or at least the five the story focuses on, appear instead obsessed with uncovering the identity of the Piper, to the point that they put their lives on the line more than once to solve the mystery.  This divide is, however, one of the elements that did not work for me, because if on one side it helped in establishing the pall of dread over the town, on the other it did not feel realistic, particularly considering the impending danger: what the five accomplish, the risks they take more than once, all happen while the adults are virtually absent and unknowing, and I find it highly improbable that a community would be so deaf and blind to the antics of a group of teenagers, given the underlying circumstances. 

 

And since I have now opened the “book of grievances”, I have to admit that the book feels too long, too meandering: given the matter at hand I would have preferred a tighter narrative, while here there is much space given to the five’s musings (which for some time amount to nothing since they have no clues at all) and to their endless cycling through the town’s streets. Still, this is a minor problem, and I easily solved it by skipping ahead in search of more interesting sections; the major one stands in the revelation of the Piper’s identity, because it comes out of the blue and to me it makes little or no sense at all.  

 

When reading mysteries we - not unlike Angelo & friends - tend to consider the various people the author introduces, evaluating the clues and forming an opinion that might or might not be the correct one; and when the revelation occurs we can either congratulate ourselves for the powers of our intuition, or acknowledge that we were barking up the wrong tree. But what happens when we discover that the monster is someone we never saw before? Someone who was never part of the story? I felt a little cheated, to say the truth, and even more so because there is no explanation whatsoever for the reasons behind the Piper’s actions, or at least none that I could consider valid. 

 

I keep thinking that as a coming of age novel December Park was a beautifully written story carried by five well-crafted, realistic characters who embarked on an “adventure” that proved formative and enlightening. It’s a pity that the final resolution marred this story with such an undeserved inconsistency….