Dictatorship, month 0, day 0

Welcome to October, Book Clubbers. The book of the month is Brock Clarke’s An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, a book so book-clubby it has its own book club guide tucked into the back pages. It is also orange and fiery, which seems appropriate to the season.

The narrator, Sam, made himself infamous at 18 when he burned down the Emily Dickinson House, by accident he says, with two people in it. Ten years in prison were not enough to appease the poetry lovers of Amherst, (although amongst the scholarly diatribes are a number of requests from New Englanders for Sam to burn down their own historic writer’s houses) and the hate is heavy. His humiliated, literary parents wish he would go away and not come back. So Sam goes to college, where he studies packaging science and meets a nice girl, and somehow fails to inform her of the felony thing and the deaths and the prison term (apparently she is not a curious person). They marry and have a child, and Sam hides from his sordid past in a ticky-tacky suburb called Camelot. But his bland, prepackaged existence rips when the son of his victims makes a visit. And someone else is burning writers’ homes in New England.

So I’ll see you all back here on Halloween. By commenting below, you agree to read! In the meantime, someone appoint yourself as Dictator for the month of November.