Chilling Reading for Chilly October

Sarah Sobanski

Reader’s Release is a monthly column where members of Cavan-Monaghan Libraries review a book from the library’s new monthly releases to keep you updated on the hottest reads available to you locally. 

If you’re feeling dissent in the looming shadow of Halloween just around the corner, Rene Denfeld’s The Enchanted might be the perfect book to help you become attuned to the dark-spirited holiday, which is among the new releases at our local libraries.

Narrated by a nameless death-row prisoner from the lower levels of an old prison, The Enchanted weaves plots that never quite explain everything you’d like to know. Names, for example, are almost never divulged. The narrator, who has done something so terrible he can’t think on it, nicknames the other characters in the novel by their physical attributes. Among them are the white-haired boy, the fallen priest, the warden and the lady, just to name a few, who each have twisting sub-plots amidst the tragedy and horror of the enchanted place – the narrator’s name for the prison. Each character is searching for something innate to human nature – love, peace, and forgiveness – and so they are never too grotesque to become totally repugnant. The narrator tells his story in sublime poetry that leaves the reader tense through the entire novel.

Easily read, with adjectives explained in a child-like wonder, The Enchanted taunts the reader through its pages in a way I’ve never experienced – I couldn’t put it down, and I didn’t feel good about that. According to the narrator, the enchanted place is a prison that holds none of the common pretenses about prisons. In this prison, the people who do the worst things are not punished by the other inmates, but allowed to build themselves into whatever they want – leaving vile murderers in league with guards and counselors. There never seems to be a winner in the prison, at least not of the anti-protagonists who you hope end up better off, but at the same time feel guilty about such a sentiment.

Denfeld drew inspiration for The Enchanted from her own work on death row as a death penalty investigator. In an interview with Harper Books, Denfeld said she heard a voice in the sky say the prison she was leaving was an enchanted place. Working with issues as old as whether man can play god by punishing another by death, Denfeld aims to reveal that even in the worst of circumstances, human kind has the ability to see beauty.

You can also find headline books like The Little Old Lady Who Broke All The Rules by C. Ingelman-Sundberg, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson amongst the Millbrook Library’s October new releases. Happy haunting!