The Glister [With Earbuds] [Preloaded Digital Audio Player]

John Burnside (Author), John Lee (Narrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2009

The children of Innertown exist in a state of suspended terror. Every year or so, a boy from their school disappears, vanishing into the wasteland of the old chemical plant. Nobody knows where these boys go, or whether they are alive or dead, and without evidence the authorities claim they are simply runaways. The town policeman, Morrison knows otherwise. He was involved in the cover-up of one boy's murder, and he believes all the boys have been killed. Though he is seriously compromised, he would still like to find out the killer's identity. The local children also want to know and, in their fear and frustration, they turn on Rivers, a sad fantasist and suspected paedophile living alone at the edge of the wasteland.Trapped and frightened, one of the boys, Leonard, tries to escape, taking refuge in the poisoned ruins of the old plant; there he finds another boy, who might be the missing Liam and might be a figment of his imagination. With his help, Leonard comes to understand the policeman's involvement, and exacts the necessary revenge - before following Liam into the Glister: possibly a disused chemical weapons facility, possibly a passage to the outer world. A terrifying exploration of loss and the violence that pools under the surface of the everyday, "Glister" is an exquisitely written, darkly imagined novel by one of our greatest contemporary writers.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best of the Month, March 2009: George Lister's secretive chemical plant fueled Innertown's economy for decades, but since its closure, its legacies are poverty, clusters of rare cancers, and a local wilderness populated with rumors of an unnatural selection of misshapen wildlife. When Mark Wilkinson--the first of several teen-aged boys to disappear every 12-18 in the coming years--is found hanged in the "poison woods" over a bizarre shrine of boughs, glass, and tinsel, the town constable chooses to cover up the atrocity (to the pleasure of Innertown's corrupt string-pullers), leaving the town's long-abandoned youth to take responsibility themselves. The Glister is a strange and affecting book, working as both simmering horror and a Dennis Lehane-style thriller: think The Blair Witch Project meets Mystic River meets It. Burnside's deliberate prose strikes a pitch-perfect balance between the insidious banalities of industrial society and the unacknowledged horrors lurking in the varicose network of cracks in its crumbling foundations, the spaces where institutionalized cowardice and naïve accountability meet to settle the fates of a damaged society's innocents. It's a story that will stay with you long after its last harrowing pages. --Jon Foro

Amazon Exclusive: Jim Crace Reviews The Glister

Jim Crace is the author of nine novels, including Being Dead, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and won the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 2000. In 1997, Quarantine was named the Whitbread Novel of the Year and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Crace has also received the Whitbread First Novel Award, the E.M. Foster Award, and the Guardian Award. Here he reviews John Burnside’s The Glister for Amazon:

I lent my copy of John Burnside’s The Glister to a friend the moment I finished it. I wanted her to share the novel’s troubled beauty and its bleak but tender outlook on the urban predicament, the state of the nation, the human condition--well, pretty much everything. “It’s a triple murder mystery,” I explained. “Teenage boys are being wiped out. So is the landscape where they live.” In my view, The Glister was not only a thrilling and engaging read but an unusually multi-layered and nuanced work of startling transcendence and importance. No one could think otherwise. Everyone should try it.

She said she was puzzled by the last scene, yet only a few weeks later she was recommending The Glister to her reading group and naming it her Novel of the Year. “So, you read it again?” I asked. But no, she hadn’t needed to encounter it a second time. As soon as she had finished its final page, a little baffled by its meaning, the story had started haunting her. It brewed in her subconscious as all great fiction does until, level by level, the book’s unnerving ambiguities began to clarify themselves, she was getting it. “It’s a sleeper,” she said, mixing her metaphors. “It creeps up on you.”

My experience of The Glister has been much the same. It is a novel with an afterlife. It continues to steep in my imagination one year after reading it and to imprint its indelible images on to my comprehension of the modern world. I now cannot help but recognize Burnside’s devastated, weed-choked Innertown in almost every industrial city that I visit on both sides of the Atlantic. And I better understand the dangerous boredom of those adolescent gangs on street corners throughout the world, their brutal, plucky hopelessness. But most importantly the novel has taught me that if we want to find an optimistic narrative to help us cope with our failing cities, their increasingly toxic landscapes and their splintered families, we have to hunt for it, as Burnside has, in the darkest corners and in the most menacing of company and not deceive ourselves with bright, narcotic fairytales.

Quite what the glister of the title is, I cannot say for sure. The novel doesn’t want to tell me exactly. It wants me to be teased. But I’m still brewing on the question, I’m still haunted by the book. There is no greater praise than that. --Jim Crace

(Photo © Lorentz Gullachsen)

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

In his bleakly beautiful seventh novel, Scottish author Burnside (The Devil's Footprint) delivers a cautionary tale illustrating that greed and an indifference to suffering are the real horrors of modern life. In recent years, five teenage boys have disappeared from the coastal village of Innertown, where an abandoned chemical plant deep in the forest is slowly poisoning its rapidly declining population. The official line is that the missing boys are seeking a better life away from the town whose sole business is slow decay. A 15-year-old lad, who's found solace in books and foreign films that he can barely understand, is determined to find out what happened to his friends and why the town's lone cop spends so much time in those tarnished woods. Burnside expertly details an apocalyptic landscape where the expectation of failure is rampant. While the ending feels hurried, Burnside's flawless prose explores how defeat is only a state of mind. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Preloaded Digital Audio Player
• Publisher: Playaway (March 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1433264137
• ISBN-13: 978-1433264139
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 4.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Lyrical Terror, March 10, 2009

By 

Sara (CARLSBAD, CA, United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Glister: A Novel (Hardcover)

John Burnside's The Glister opens in a modern day ghost town. The chemical plant that once fused the city with life and prosperity has been closed and left to rot. Everything in the town can be described as dead and deformed. The town's adults are apathetic, depressed and diseased. The children are violent, promiscuous, and haunted. But no one ever leaves the town, unless of course, they disappear.

This book is not a typical horror or mystery novel. It's more of a very long dark fable complete with an abstract ending and an obscure moral. This is not an easy read; it can best be described as uncomfortable and difficult. Burnside manages to infuse every aspect of his tales with menace, down to the last comma. There is sex, violence and adult language--the majority of it committed by young adults. It's also the kind of book that may torment it's readers for months. If there is a more terrifying or disturbing novel out there, I have yet to read it. I'd warn anyone considering the novel that it is scary and edgy. You may not like it, but you should definitely read it.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It Shines but not Shimmers, March 10, 2009

By 

Cheryl Koch (CO) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Glister: A Novel (Hardcover)

The town and the people of Innertown have never been the same since George Lister's chemical plant shut down, especially the woods. There is something evil in the woods. Every year a boy or two disappears, never to be seen or heard from again. The police won't do anything about the disappearances as there is no sign of foul play. There are a few people who believe otherwise and they are town policeman, John Morrison in addition to Leonard and his friends. It seems that Morrison knows there is evil hiding in the woods but he just like the rest of the authorities will not do anything about it. So it is up to Leonard and his friends to fight the darkness, before it claims the rest of them.

Having never read any of author, John Burnside's other previous works to go off of what type of author Mr. Burnside is; I thought The Glister was a hauntingly dark and gruesome piece of work. That is a good thing. It drew the reader in and enveloped them in Evil. I couldn't stop reading. The Glister is like riding a horrifying roller-coaster ride that you can't get abandon till the end, so all you have left to do is just hold on tight and enjoy the ride. I like that horror fans as well as anyone looking for a good scary will enjoy The Glister. This is one book you will want to get your hands on as soon as possible. You won't regret it.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great character studies, Terrible plot, March 19, 2009

By 

B. Calhoun (Anaconda, MT USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Glister: A Novel (Hardcover)

Much like previous reviewers, I found the premise of this novel intriguing. Disappearing children, mutated animals, a crooked run-down town's cover-up. Reading the book flap makes this novel out to be a dark, twisted tale. In the traditional sense, this is not the case. The story portrayed on the book flap never really occurs. The flap jacket paints a story of a group of kids on a quest for answers to the dark town secret. In reality, this entire premise consists of one major scene that involves a stereotypical, unoriginal belief one kid has formulated.

When looked at as a character study, this book is a winner. The characters are well fleshed out and Burnside does a fine job of getting the reader to fall quickly into the stories of these characters.

The writing that accompanies these characters is superb. As others have stated, the entire book is taut with a dark, lingering air of horror throughout the book. That is why the last 30 pages are such a major disappointment. The climax and ultimate unveiling of the mystery is thin, lazy, and rushed.

Ultimately Burnside should have put these characters in a setting he could handle or wrap up this premise with a decent ending. I feel cheated after taking the time to read this book, albeit slim, only to come up with a pathetic ending.