Gary K. Wolfe Reviews The Blade Between by Sam J. Miller

The Blade Between, Sam J. Miller (Ecco 978-0-06-296982-8, $26.99, 384pp, hc) December 2020.

In both of Sam J. Miller’s YA novels, The Art of Starving and Destroy All Monsters, Hudson High School – presumably a version of the same small-town high school that Miller attended in upstate New York – is nearly as powerful an antagonist as the supernatural forces that threaten Miller’s outsider heroes. With The Blade Between, the whole town of Hudson be­comes a central character, and most of the human characters seem to have known each other in that high school: Ronan, now a successful Manhattan photographer but whose high school years were a nightmare of bullies and homophobia; Dom, his former boyfriend, now a Hudson cop; At­talah, Dom’s wife, working for Child Protective Services; Zelda, who works under Attalah but has fallen on hard times; Stubby, Ronan’s bully nemesis from high school; Treenie, a prom-queen type now working as a real estate agent, thoroughly in the pocket of the developers who are threatening to completely remake Hudson as an upscale hipster haven. Other characters include Ronan’s increas­ingly debilitated father, whose refusal to sell out has hindered the plans for Hudson’s redevelopment, and a tech billionaire named Jark Trowse, who’s running for mayor in order to fully consolidate his control of the town. The fact that so many of the central char­acters were schoolmates, together with the town’s cryptic history (an unlikely whaling port more than a hundred miles from the ocean, later a center of pros­titution) and a particularly worrisome ghost, lends an odd Scooby-Doo undertone to what is otherwise an increasingly grim and sharp-edged novel.

The main engine of the novel’s power, and a pretty bold decision on Miller’s part, is hate, which is described early on by Ronan as “the blade that Hudson lodged ages ago between your ribs,” and which later manifests itself among other characters as something more than mere metaphor. Initially, Ronan’s hate for Hudson, fueled by memories of homophobic beatings and small-town intolerance, makes him dread the trip home to visit his ailing father, even though an attractive young model named Katch – whom he met only days earlier – persuaded him to go. Since Ronan’s first-person chapters alter­nate with third-person chapters focusing on Dom, we learn before Ronan does that Katch had actually committed suicide a month earlier, thrusting us into what is now a ghost story. Once Ronan arrives home, though, his abiding hatred for the town almost reverses itself, as he joins with a group of locals, led by Dom’s wife Attalah, in trying protect the town from the wholesale takeover by those opportunistic developers led by Trowse, and from the trendy New York “invaders” who have already turned the historic downtown into a festival of antique shops and over­priced coffeehouses. This resistance, which begins with a kind of guerrilla effort at discomfiting the new guests with insulting banners and lapel pins reading “You Are Hated,” rapidly escalates to violence, vandalism, and a particularly vicious kind of sexual blackmail. Some of the protestors, like Zelda, begin to take matters into their own hands, but even more fearsome is a demonic ghost, named Tom Minniq and somehow conjured by Ronan’s own nightmares and Photoshop skills. Ronan initially thinks of him as an online hoax, “my magnificent Frankenstein sex bot,” but it soon becomes apparent that Minniq is much more, and has his own plans.

While the supernatural elements of The Blade Between rapidly gain momentum in the second half of the novel, leading to a stunning and tragic conclusion, the central issues – a town resisting gentrification, Ronan’s increasingly ambivalent feel­ing about a hometown he was once glad to escape, predatory capitalism, community organizing – hardly need vengeful ghosts to develop resonance. The power of hate, though, which comes up again and again in the novel and is almost an obsession with Ronan, gains quite a bit from Miller’s deployment of the otherworldly, especially once we get outside of Ronan’s head. His own musings, unfortunately, sometimes lead toward therapeutic bromides – “to hate something is to cleave your soul to it,” “hate was a drug,” “I was so focused on how much I hated this place that I never saw how much I also loved it,” “it’s okay to love something that you hate,” etc. The ghostly Tom Minniq, though, is considerably less sentimental. In his world, hate is power, an increasingly autonomous force that can demolish communities in an ever-widening, self-consuming feedback loop. In the end, it’s that view of latent, abiding evil – something like Hudson’s own version of Pennywise, only more darkly erotic – that gives The Blade Between its considerable power. We may find it comforting that Ronan eventually comes to terms with his own hate, but we ought to be absolutely terrified of what Tom Minniq represents.

This review and more like it in the November 2020 issue of Locus.

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