Lost Boys
by Orson Scott Card
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HarperCollins: 1992. Paperback: 528 pages. ISBN-10: 0-06-109131-6 ISBN-13: 978-0-06-109131-5 Suggested retail price: $5.99 (US) Tags: Horror; Mormons; murder; Mystery; North Carolina; serial killer Tactical strength: [5/10] |
Unlike Ender's Game, Card's Lost Boys demonstrates that a successful short story cannot always make the transition to a novel. In most of Card's stories, he depicts people with some sort of extraordinary abilities: military geniuses, divas, prophets. Obviously, the lives of exceptional people make for exceptional stories. In Lost Boys, Card strays from that formula and makes the prodigy's parents his main characters. Now you shouldn't conclude that the lives of ordinary people cannot make good fiction, but it seems that Card's forte lies with depicting the exceptional rather than the unexceptional.
In Lost Boys, Card depicts the lives of the Step and DeAnne Fletcher family, who move to Steuben, North Carolina, so Step can take a job with an educational software company. For the majority of the book, the Fletcher family deals with everyday life -- an unsatisfactory job, problems with the third-grade teacher, and acclimatizing to living in a southern state. Their only exceptional quality is membership in the Mormon church, which has almost no bearing on the story's anticlimactic outcome.
To explain Card's ending would remove any reason for reading Lost Boys, so let me explain why the ending disappointed me while tiptoeing around any spoilers. My life runs at about the same pace as the Fletcher's life. I have to deal with a seemingly never-ending stream of problems and challenges -- no rise and fall of the plot, just a constant level of tension with no variation. Card describes real life quite well, but reading about characters like myself really doesn't interest me. Despite Card's successful demonstration of Step's job anxieties and DeAnne's overprotective personality quirks, the character's traits have almost no bearing on the story's outcome or with their reactions to the outcome. Knowing that Card started with a short story, I have to accuse him of padding the story with insignificant detail to create a novel from a shorter work. In fact, the surprise feels like the mild shock you expect from a short story, not the grand revelation of the unknown you would expect after 500 pages of story.
Card doesn't even introduce the suspenseful elements that play on the story's resolution until well into the novel. As a suspense novel, Lost Boys pales when compared to almost any other suspense novel because Card ignores the horror and terror that he could have built. Instead, we have the tension created by an overprotective mother, who turns out to have no power to protect her children anyway.
And for me the clincher: Card relies on the fact that most people will sympathize when bad things happen to little children. If you told this same story but substituted older parents dealing with adult or teenage children, the story would loose most of its emotional impact.
Lost Boys disappoints as either a horror novel or a mainstream real-life story. I would suggest reading the original short story and then moving on to some of Card's more engaging works.
