Brother
Ania Ahlborn
Gallery Books
September, 2015
Reviewed by Jess Landry
Deep in the heart of Appalachia stands a crooked farmhouse miles from any road. The Morrows keep to themselves, and it’s served them well so far. When girls go missing off the side of the highway, the cops don’t knock on their door. Which is a good thing, seeing as to what’s buried in the Morrows’ backyard.
But nineteen-year-old Michael Morrow isn’t like the rest of his family. He doesn’t take pleasure in the screams that echo through the trees. Michael pines for normalcy, and he’s sure that someday he’ll see the world beyond West Virginia. When he meets Alice, a pretty girl working at a record shop in the small nearby town of Dahlia, he’s immediately smitten. For a moment, he nearly forgets about the monster he’s become. But his brother, Rebel, is all too eager to remind Michael of his place…
Imagine being in the mind of a killer, getting a better idea into his psyche, trying to understand why he does what he does. In Ania Ahlborn’s Brother, readers are given that glimpse into not just one, but two minds — Michael, the reserved nineteen-year-old who starts to wonder if a life outside of his family is possible, and his older brother, Reb, who rules the roost. Basically, Ahlborn flips the script leaving the reader to root for a character who’d generally be played out as the bad guy. In this case, Michael is the lesser of two evils, so it’s easy to put empathize with him.
Brother reads a lot like a novelization of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a similarity the author herself notes at the end though she makes a point to note that the idea for the novel came from a lesser known TCM-style film called Chained. So if that piques your interest, you’ll likely very much enjoy this look into the minds of a family of killers.
