Sometimes Christian's drawings are taken over by the thoughts of those around him, and when he draws their deepest fears, they die. Seventeen-year-old Christian is a loner at school-which is what tends to happen when you live in a small town with a hidden history, your parents have disappeared, you hear voices in your head from "the sideways place," and you can draw people to death. Interest levels might fluctuate across overlong scenes, but patient readers will be well rewarded. And that's just the tip of the iceberg: psychotic bullies, deformed babies, sex scandals-you almost need to take notes to keep up. Christian awakes from one of these fugues to find himself blamed for painting swastikas on a barn, a terrible event that results in two fortuitous meetings: a dying old man in a nursing home with a connection to Christian's dreams and a friendly psychiatrist who becomes his chief confidant. He is also having some vivid dreams in which he inhabits the body of a child in the 1940s, watching as a town business leader uses German POWs as laborers.
Seventeen-year-old Christian is a painter who is developing some disturbing talents: he can paint others' thoughts and memories, perhaps even influencing their actions. Packed with enough ideas to fuel two or three books, Bick's ambitious, intelligent, and relentlessly dark novel is a notable achievement, even if it (understandably) wavers beneath its own weight.
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