The tongue and cheek subtitle of Dan Kois’s Hampton Heights is, “One Harrowing Night In the Most Haunted Neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,” which for this reviewer set an expectation for an unserious romp through streets and alleyways rife with all manners of ghosts and ghouls. The cover art of the US edition features some red-eyed horned creature with its claws on a Playboy magazine, a white van streaked with blood, and a misshapen bipedal werewolf standing near a building which has a sign out front whose logo unmistakably identifies it as a Burger King. And I was here for it. Let me turn my brain off for a few hours each night and immerse myself in crude humor, gross-out horror, and buckets of blood.
Around page 135 I sat, reading, a mug of forgotten tea rapidly cooling on the coffee table, and tears welling in my eyes.
Okay, so, it doesn’t take much to tug at my heartstrings anyway, but I was not expecting it from this book. This book which began with the sleazy thirty-something paperboy manager, Kevin, picking up his six adolescent charges for a night of canvassing for subscriptions, only to immediately head to a bar and hook up with a Green Bay Packers jersey wearing, White Snake loving succubus once the boys have set out into the neighborhood. This book which delivers its readers a scene where one of the six paperboys in the back of the dilapidated van has brought his boombox with a microphone so that he can collect more audio of people’s farts. This book that gave great weight and personal importance the artifact of a single issue of Playboy Magazine featuring “Susan, whose turn-ons included mustaches, massages, and a great sense of humor.” This book snuck in three incredibly beautifully written, tender stories of boys navigating the fraught path to manhood.
The paperboys are paired off and sent into different directions in order to sell newspaper subscriptions to the residents of Hampton Heights with the team selling the most subscriptions promised a twenty dollar reward.
Each pair highlights a specific theme that the novel addresses. With Sigmone and Joel, the first of the boys whose story plays out we are treated to a werewolf story as a metaphor for race and class struggles, finding your pack, and next generational blending. Some may find blanche at the idea of Dan Kois, who is white, ruminating on themes of race, but I believe he’s handled it with nuance and with appropriate amount of distance, using Joel as a well-meaning but ultimately clueless avatar for those outside of the very personal realities for people of color.
Second we have Mark and Ryan’s story. The boys are fascinated by a couple of witches and in an ethereal trancelike fashion they live a multitude of experiences within the walls of their cottage. As they grow and learn from the witches they are told a fantastic love story spanning centuries of the witches’ lives, complete with an oppressive patriarchal figure they were forced to reckon with.
Finally Al and Nishu contend with an ancient monster and troll who steals the boys’ memories and precious objects. This story in particular is full of humor shows boys at their most juvenile, laughing at themselves into fits over obscenities. But even at its most light hearted, the author cuts to the bone asking how important our memories are, and what we would do to keep them.
These stories are more magical whimsey than outright horror. The neighborhood serves as homes for local folklore and it never feels that the author ever sets out to evoke fear or dread in the reader, but instead to instill a sense of wonder with it’s supernatural events. The characters are fully realized and they grow with their experiences (yes, even Kevin). The writing is good, clearly delivering its message without being dull, though never making that leap to greatness. Though the prose may not stick with me, nevertheless, the stories certainly will.
Beneath the teenage hijinks veneer of Hampton Heights is a story with heart and affection for its subjects. Dan Kois skillfully navigates messy subjects of race, class, patriarchy, and queer romance through the lenses of magic and horror wrought on these boys by the denizens of Milwaukee’s most haunted neighborhood. In the end, this book is a balm for the soul of this middle aged man who remembers fondly what it was like to be discovering the world for the first time.
The Barberry Writers 