One More Shot Fired: A Book Review of Bloomland by John Englehardt
Debut author John Englehardt delivers three, fictious survivors of a school shooting. Rose, an on-campus girl distanced from the scene, Eddie, a professor whose wife was victim number one, and Eli, the shooter. Bloomland is a jarring, second person narrative work of fiction which seeks to challenge our notion of victimhood. It is a book that all at once feels angsty, overwhelming, and vindictive.
I took to Instagram to get some reader feedback on this book. While the publishing institution loves it, I wondered about the consumers. Readers tried. They tried to complete it, tried to like Eli the antagonist, tried to understand the book. Many felt extremely disconnected from the text.
Englehardt admits in his prose, page 33, “It’s this remark that will become one of your most misleading clues you leave behind. Because while this admission might point toward how small and degenerate your world has become, what people will latch onto is not what the voice says, but the fact that you heard one. It is this voice that made you evil and deranged, that will speak to you from an abstract hell conveniently place outside our understanding. It is this voice, we will say, that tells you to kill.”
We aren’t meant to understand or explain mass shootings because they are outside reason, even for the shooter. The Washington Post reviewer Kristen Millares Young voiced her concern when she wrote, “There are risks to empathy, not the least of which is the uneasy sensationalism of a shooter whose sole contribution is the destruction of other people’s futures.”
Much of this book felt like a serious attempt to showcase a new narrative about mass shootings. Instead the characters, situations, and explanations were a poetic repeat of Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora Theatre, Sandy Hooke, and much of the others.
Like Eli’s death words, “Something was missing, and the shooting was my way of trying to get it back.” Englehardt’s novel chased after the missing element no one can truly define in a mass shooting. We angle it every way possible to understand and yet in a circular pattern we end up reliving the events over and over. Maybe this is a contributing factor for fanatics today, by trying to explain the shootings we are encouraging recurrences?
Englehardt’s prose is expressive, deep, and haunting. When reading his work, I felt like I was looking at a large slab of beef wondering how to portion it out. Maybe the audience is hoping for a balanced meal to dine on with reverence and certain amount of polite presentation.
His prose is tight. Bloomland might not have worked any other way. More than one hundred ninety pages and the story would drag despite covering great breadth and depth. Think about watching Emily Blum’s The Quiet Place, an audience can only allow so much discomfort before they abandon the artist. Englehardt tottered right on that line.
The entire time I was reading like a race to the finish line. I didn’t enjoy the experience. I needed the pain and discomfort to be behind me. Today, people are gasping for a breath of fresh air living in the polluted atmosphere of gun violence, hatred, massacres, violent riots, and people hurting people. Bloomland is a mixed bag of pain, discomfort, awe, and confusion. I approached this book with an appropriate amount of caution being a Coloradan child in the post-Columbine school era. There was a part of me that really wanted to read a different narrative even if it outraged me (siding with the shooter) or caught me off guard (a well sorted happy ending). Instead I stood before the worn memorial in Clement Park looking at what was missing, that which I cannot identify.
Englehardt’s work is to be celebrated. He presented powerful prose, rich metaphors, and stunning character monologues. This book is a seek out if interested suggestion from me. I was not in a place to fully appreciate and enjoy Bloomland, if it had not been for this review, I would not have completed it. From a writer’s perspective, there are many skills to be learned from Englehardt’s completed work.
From page 61, “I keep thinking it’s absurd to argue about what the shooting means, because maybe there is no meaning. Telling Eli we forgive him? That’s like pardoning a storm.”
Important titles that shed light on this incredibly challenging issue.
