First line: The muted thunder of wagon wheels wakes me from shallow sleep.
When Peter is a small child, tragedy takes his parents from him and he’s sent to live at St. Vincent’s, a church-turned-orphanage in the middle of nowhere. Years later, teenaged Peter is a big brother to the younger orphans, training under Father Andrew to become a priest. One stormy winter night, a group of men arrive, an injured man covered in symbols of the occult among them. His behavior is erratic, insane. He makes a foreboding proclamation and dies. After his burial in the church cemetery, some of the children start behaving differently. They convene in the shadows, whispering, plotting. Are these children mostly harmless, or is something more sinister at play?
The first half really does a good job of building up dread before the second half hits. Fracassi shows how terribly the boys are treated by Father Poole and his lackey, Brother Johnson, and how the orphanage is already an awful, depressing, oppressive place that we know is only about to get worse. And we can only imagine the ways in which that will happen, but we’ll probably be wrong!
We’re also introduced to a lot of characters in the first half, as there are over 20 orphans. Peter is the most important one as we see things from his perspective a lot of times. He’s a great, likeable character with a lot of depth. Throughout the book, he’s wrestling with an important choice he must make. His struggle with his upcoming decision is extremely relatable, and when he’s forced to make the choice, it’s heartbreaking. It’s easy to love (and hate!) many of the other characters in the book as well. My least favorite was Father Poole and I really loved David, another orphan at St. Vincent’s.
The story shifts back and forth from third-person POV to Peter’s first-person POV. We’re introduced to the other boys as he mentions them, and I’m not sure he even mentions all of them. That’s fine, as they aren’t all important, but I got a little confused here and there when Timothy or Thomas or whoever said or did something. I couldn’t keep a lot of the background boys straight. It was a little disorienting, but I actually liked it. As I mentioned before, some of the boys begin to behave strangely, and there are parts where Peter doesn’t know who he can trust. Because I couldn’t quite remember who was who of the ‘background kids,’ I was often right there with him, wondering who was trustworthy and who wasn’t.
The Boys in the Valley interested me from the start, but it didn’t become a book I could not put down until the second half. Once there, I did not stop until I finished the book because I couldn’t walk away from what was going on. There was a ton of action, lots of chaos, and it was so intense! I didn’t expect the ending, but it was perfect.
A fantastic book. And it’s one of Sadie Hartmann’s 101 Horror Books to Read Before You’re Murdered, so you should probably hop to it!
The Boys in the Valley by Philip Fracassi
Little Vermo Reviews 