A Prayer for the Dying [Hardcover]

Stewart O'Nan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 12, 1999

Set in a leafy Wisconsin town just after the American Civil War, this story opens one languid summer's day. Only slowly do events reveal themselves as sinister as one neighbour after another succumbs to a creeping, fatal disease.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

When his town's sleepy summer tranquility is shattered by an outbreak of diphtheria, Jacob Hansen--constable, deacon, and undertaker--stares at an impossible dilemma: save both himself and his family or observe his many duties? Although he's nearly convinced that it's possible to do both, the inexorable and crushing horror of Stewart O'Nan's fifth novel, A Prayer for the Dying, is that evil doesn't flinch, that its insistence can obliterate goodness, corrupt humility. "When won't faith save you?" Jacob wonders; the silence soon deafens him.

An ostensibly inured Civil War veteran, Jacob watches helplessly as his neighbors in tiny Friendship, Wisconsin, are stricken with disease: simply hearing a mother say of her daughter, "She's sick," becomes chilling. Yet even as his wife and baby fall ill, Jacob patiently, dutifully tends to the helpless and buries the dead. When panic erupts, however, and he grapples with the tragedies accumulating before him, he feels the prick of spiritual doubt, even succumbs to violence. "Is this the devil's work?" Jacob asks as he struggles to discern the good in a world without order, watches those he serves turn against him, and disregards his own moral outrage.

O'Nan's style is taut and often oddly lovely, its immediacy braced by an unnerving second-person voice. The novel is, at root, spiritually terrifying. It forces us to consider at what remove we truly are from evil. Overwhelmed with checking his own despair, Jacob begins by pondering how to halt wickedness and ineluctably finds himself sustaining its slow creep. You wonder if he ever had a prayer. --Ben Guterson

From Publishers Weekly

If there were any doubt of his protean gifts on the basis of his four previous, singularly different novels (A World Away, etc.), O'Nan again proves himself a writer of dazzling virtuosity and imagination. This eloquent horror tale/philosophical fable is yet another of his narratives in which character and fate intertwine in a situation of moral gravity. Narrator Jacob Hansen (who speaks to himself in the third person: "You can feel the past oozing up like mud") is a psychologically scarred Civil War veteran. Shortly after the end of the conflict, he has settled with his wife and baby daughter in the tiny prairie town of Friendship, Wis., which is now in the midst of a spectacularly beautiful summer?and a troubling drought. Jacob has three jobs?as undertaker, constable and minister?and a crushing, somewhat eerie sense of responsibility for all of the citizens of Friendship. His feverish piety and his repeated declarations of faith are gradually revealed as thin coverings over a bottomless well of despair. When three deaths from diphtheria occur in quick succession, Jacob convinces his wife not to leave town with the baby, even as he is passively fatalistic about their slim chances of escaping infection. After both Marta and the baby die, Jacob becomes unhinged; he keeps their bodies in the house, dressing, washing and sleeping with them. Outwardly, however, he doggedly continues to go about his duties, rendered even more frantic as the epidemic escalates, a quarantine is belatedly imposed, and many of the townspeople try to steal away during the night. Meanwhile, a wildfire is moving implacably toward the area, and the serene summertime landscape turns into a version of hell as the sky darkens and the air is heavy with ashes. Even as he commits acts of violence under the duress of duty, Jacob muses that this may be the reckoning described in biblical prophecy: the world cleansed by pestilence and fire. Indeed, Jacob is a version of Job, although he never challenges God but questions his own culpability in failing to keep his world whole and peaceful. O'Nan does a superb job of establishing the faint sense of menace that grows into a horrifying nightmare of random destruction and death. Outside of a few red-herring details, the narrative moves with surefooted technique into the realm of sinister gothic mystery. Profoundly unsettling, it requires a leap of faith from the reader that may, like Jacob's faith, fail at times, but it is a mesmerizing story and a brilliant tour de force. Author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 195 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; 1st edition (April 12, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805061479
• ISBN-13: 978-0805061475
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (90 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #641,132 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Stewart O'Nan's award-winning fiction includes Snow Angels, A Prayer for the Dying, Last Night at the Lobster, and Emily, Alone. Granta named him one of America's Best Young Novelists. He lives in Pittsburgh.

www.stewart-onan.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Riveting novel from a truly gifted author, March 28, 2000

By 

Janice M. Hansen (California United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Prayer for the Dying (Hardcover)

This is a truly gifted author. I became familiar with him when I read Snow Angels, and since then I have purchased nearly every book he has written. Each novel is an original piece. This novel, Prayer for the Dying is another stunning acomplishment. He takes the reader to post Civil War Wisconsin. His first person accounting is riveting as he takes you into the heart, mind and soul of Jacob Hansen, town sheriff, undertaker and pastor. Add to this odd mixture of occupations a devasting diptheria plague that threatens the town's human and animal population. A gentle, loving and spiritual family man, he must make horrendous decisions involving the township. While tradgedy befalls the town, he must cope with the possibility that he may have infected his beloved wife and baby daughter after undertaking the initial diptheria cases. Stewart O'Nan sets a thoroughly researched scene for the reader. You will walk through his surroundings and feel yourself in every step he takes, while you explore all his thoughts that challenge his faith and own mortality. An absolute masterpiece.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE REAL DEAL!!!, August 24, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Prayer for the Dying (Hardcover)

Sick of books that run out of steam around the the last 50 pages? This incredible novelette will knock you on your butt! This is no joke. If you haven't read a good horror book for a long time, and are sick of carbon-copy stories by King, Koontz and Rice, stop whatever you are reading and go pick this up! O'nan's story comes out of the clear blue nowhere and leaves you in awe the last 15 pages. You'll have to go back and re-read just to comprehend the scope of what he's just done to you, the reader. People in the field of horror might say that this has already been done before in stories like Faulkner's "A Rose For Emily", but as an overly avid reader of horror I promise you that O'nan's work is fresh, original, and very compelling. This has to be a strong contender for the Bram Stoker award. In most stories you are given the luxury of considering how you would act if you were the main character. In "Prayer for the Dying" you don't have a choice. YOU ARE THE MAIN CHARACTER!! My hat's off to O'nan.

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Choices/Obligations, February 26, 2001

By 

Jack Slay (LaGrange, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Prayer for the Dying (Paperback)

I've just read for the third time this amazing book. It's as stunning a read the third time as the first. Told in the second person -- which, admittedly, can first be a bit disconcerting (with its hey-look-at-me-I-got-an-MFA-in-creative-writing pretensions) but that soon becomes an evocative part of the haunting prose -- the novel involves Jacob Hansen, sheriff, undertaker, and preacher to 1860s Friendship Wisconsin. Jacob's life is no pleasure cruise: he finds himself battling a terrible outbreak of diptheria that steals his town, his friends, his family; in addition, there's an out-of-control forest fire bearing town on his little town. Part horror story, part treatise on the nature of good and evil, on the choices we make, part poetry, the tale is unforgettable, one that will linger long after you've shut the book. There is a litany of horrific revealations toward end, each more shocking than the one before. You'll reel, you'll gasp, you'll read more. And that last line will ring loudest, reverberating in your mind for a long time to come.

In the end A Prayer for the Dying is all about decisions and how some choices are less choices than obligations. What O'Nan allows us to discover through Jake Hansen is that our goodness is sometimes contingent on circumstances (something most of us don't like to admit -- if we even bother to think about it in the first place).

Tremendous.