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    A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain
    A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain
    A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain
    Audiobook7 hours

    A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain

    Written by Adrianne Harun

    Narrated by Dan John Miller

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In isolated British Columbia, girls, mostly native, are vanishing from the sides of a notorious highway. Leo Kreutzer and his four friends are barely touched by these disappearances-until a series of mysterious and troublesome outsiders come to town. Then it seems as if the devil himself has appeared among them.

    In this intoxicatingly lush debut novel, Adrianne Harun weaves together folklore, mythology, and elements of magical realism to create a compelling and unsettling portrait of life in a dead-end town. A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain is atmospheric and evocative of place and a group of people, much in the way that Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones conjures the South, or Charles Bock's Beautiful Children provides a glimpse of the Las Vegas underworld: kids left to fend for themselves in a broken world-rendered with grit and poetry in equal measure.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 12, 2014
    ISBN9781494570286
    A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain

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    Reviews for A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain

    3.5/5

    49 ratings9 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Don’t waste your time . Disappointed . The narrator was good
    • 4/5
      I want a way to give half stars, because this is a solid 4 1/2 stars for me. Dark, disturbing and hallucinatory--like Sherman Alexie collaborating with Stephen King, only minus those authors' moments of humor to lighten things up--this is not a book for everyone, but definitely rewards those who make the journey through its darkness.
    • 4/5
      This is a book I should have loved more than I did. The character are spot on, from Leo, and his half-Indian friends neither fitting in one world or another, to Hana Swan and Keven Seven, not quite villains, but harbingers evil.The town this book is set in a remote Canadian town in British Columbia, surviving off of Lumber and Mining, but thriving on neither. The high schoolers are stuck between worlds, needing to work just to survive, but with no opportunities. Add in missing women, women who walk home at night after work, but never arrive.I found the writing competent, but at times disjointed. The three pieces of missing women, the downfall of the local crime boss, and than what happens at the hotel, are connected, but its a bit disjointed, not always clear on what is happening. Hana Swan and Keven Seven are never really explained, nor is their role in all this. I think the elements are important, but in this story, they are too jumbled.One thing, there is a sentence about how the res kids drink any alcohol they can find, but they do it because nothing better will happen. This is a thought that is eye-opening to those who have a future to look forward to.
    • 4/5
      All the descriptions of this say it's beautiful, and I guess it is, but what it mostly is is a sensitively-written depiction of people whose lives were never going to be good but which didn't have to be this bad. It's rough going, tragic even (especially) when exciting, and the places where things don't get entirely explained are just the right places to leave empty.
    • 4/5
      A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain by Adrianne Harun is a gratifying, atmospheric debut novel that is highly recommended.

      "That wasn’t the first summer girls went missing off the Highway, not the first time a family lost its dearest member to untraceable evil, but it was the first time someone I loved was among that number—spirited away, it seemed, although I knew better." Leo Kreutzer is the narrator in Harun's novel about five friends, all seventeen, who meet the devil in earthly forms during one hot dry summer in a small British Columbia logging town. Girls have been going missing along the highway for years but during this summer the five friends may actually meet the prince of lies and his handmaiden.

      "The five of us—Jackie; Bryan; Bryan’s sister, Ursie; Tessa; and me—had been oddball friends since swaddling days, and as soon as we started school, that friendship had been cemented. Part Kitselas, part Haisla, part Polish and German, Ursie, Bryan, and me fit with neither the white nor the Indian kids, who spurned us in different ways. But Jackie, who held her whole generous nation in her blood, adopted us..." (Location 106)

      While the five friends try to find a diversion from their bleak lives by shooting at the town dump together, they know their lives are rife with prejudice, poverty, drug abuse, and alcoholism. They were hardly prepared for the mysterious arrival in town and in their lives of Hana Swann and Kevin Seven, and the evil they set into motion. Although it could be easily argued that evil was already in their town with the violent drug dealing Nagel brothers and Gerald Flacker.

      "Revenge, resentment—a kind of low-level heat that burned constantly within us, tamped down by the silence we knew would be our only protection until we couldn’t stand it anymore and the flames burst through. We had seen that happen to others and wondered when it would happen to us, break us wide open so that we would be set free or singed beyond repair. Jackie would be the first, the rest of us were sure. She was tough and stoic, but beneath it, her sense of fairness was acute, and her pain at every injustice became harder and harder to hide."(Location 156)

      While telling the story of that fateful summer, Leo also shares folk stories his dying uncle Jud has told him, which he has written down in notebooks. His uncle's stories are central to the plot and illustrate/illuminate the narrative, giving the action a sense of timelessness as old as evil itself. But everyone has a story, as Leo's tale unfolds we know this, only as Leo points out, "Almost everybody who shows up here has a story, usually embellished and smoothed out. That’s one big difference right off between those who arrive and those who live here. Our own stories were unedited—sprawling and unpretty—and nothing could clip and shape and redefine them as long as we stayed here." (Location 199)

      We know that something bad is going to happen, as Leo foreshadows, "I guess we both must have known then that trouble was not on its way; it was already here. Although how could we have known how many forms that trouble would take?"(Location 358) And that is the crux of the question: exactly what form is the evil going to take and who is going to be harmed?

      A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain is poetic and full of magic realism along with supernatural stories and a mythology of its own. All these elements intertwine and weave together to form a truly memorable debut novel. The title is taken from one of the stories told to Leo by Uncle Jud.

      Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Penguin Books via Netgalley for review purposes.


    • 2/5
      Title - A Man Came Out of a Door in the MountainAuthor - Adriane HarunSummary - In a remote northern town, young girls; mostly Native Americans, has been gone missing. Though the authorities have many suspects, the local gang of meth dealers at the top of that list, a young group of native and half breed friends may have an altogether suspect. One that steps out of their history and legends."...Almost everybody who shows up here has a story, usually embellished and smoothed out. That's one big difference right off between those who arrive and those who live here. Our own stories were unedited-sprawling and unpretty-and nothing could clip and shape and redefine them as long as we stayed here. As long as we were alive..."Leo and his friends; Bryan, Tessa, Jackie, and Ursie do their best to keep a low profile. From whatever is taking the girls and from Flacker and his gang until they cannot take it anymore. Bryan is sure Flacker and his hoods are taking the girls, but Leo has a different idea. An idea borne from listening to the tales rattled on by his Uncle Lud. Leo believes something has come to town and they are all in danger."...Later, after they'd delivered the boys back to the reserve, Toby asked Uncle Lud, "How did you know to do that boy? Who taught you that song?" But Uncle Lud couldn't say, any more than the reserve boys could explain Snow Woman, the will-o'-the-wisp who tried to woo them from this life. They'd have chills for months afterward, even into the summer. A misery set into their bones that even drink couldn't ease..."As Bryan put into motion his plan to destroy Flacker and his gang, Ursie is hidden in a hotel room dealing cards with a man, a spirit, a devil called Keven Seven; Leo must find a way to save Tessa from the death that awaits her at human and spirit hands alive."...Uncle Lud shouldn't have known about all that. But he did; I was sure he did. Just as I was sure he saved two boys from Snow Woman and heard Keven Seven instructing Ursie in dark arts. I imagined Uncle Lud in his final hours ascending his own mountain path, standing one last vigil as the Man Who Came Out of a Door in the Mountain arrived in his sights, shadowing the creature until the rock slipped back into place behind him, at least for a while..."Review - This is one of those books that leaves me conflicted. I wanted to like it much more than I did. I wanted it to be better. I wanted the story to come together and I wanted it to make sense. In the end it does. Sort of. And that's the problem.The disappearing girls quickly becomes less of the central theme in the novel and instead is replaced by the small dead end life of the young people involved. Leo and his friends are both outcasts from the native people because of their mixed heritage and outcast from the townspeople due to their native blood. While this could also be a worthy novel it to is left tapped upon but not really explored.The legends and mysticism of the Native culture is also brought out and for a time it is wondered whether some of the more eccentric characters are in fact spirits of the mountain or just really strange drugged out low-lifes. It just seems that in this novel all these items have been touched on but not brought together in any kind of real format that enhanced the novel. Lots of ingredients but not stewed to a worthy broth. So what we are left with is a sense of what should have been.
    • 4/5
      I awaited this book with much excitement, despite knowing very little about what I would read. Adrianne Harun has a lovely, lyrical style of writing. Her wording is not flowery, but evokes such precise, sharp images. I found it similar to Paul Harding's style in _Enon_, how the structure of his sentences spiraled, making me dizzy in the most pleasant possible way._A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain_ , while inspired by the women abducted along Northern Canada's "Highway of Tears", has more to do with Good and Evil; how one can see them coming and decide how to act or be acted upon. Pulling from a mixture of myth and grim small-town reality, Harun deftly weaves her tale around the fate of five teenagers and those close to them.
    • 4/5
      There are novels in which place is a character unto itself, when tone and setting are so artfully evoked that the reader is practically standing alongside the story's protagonists. A skilled writer transports readers by drawing on the generalities with we're all familiar--nature, in its grandeur or grotesqueness; city life, with its commotion and loneliness--and then situating them within the unique context--the setting--of the story. Philip Meyer's American Rust comes to mind, as do Cormac McCarthy's novels. With a touch less darkness and a pinch of magic, we may add add Adrianne Harun's A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain (February 2014, Penguin) to that list.The story is set in an isolated town in British Columbia. As with many small towns, this one is less an idyllic hamlet than it is a hopeless blip in the wilderness. Harun masterfully conveys the desolation with references to an apparently hostile natural world and the rot characteristic at humanity's attempts to defy it. Gerald Flacker, the local meth dealer, and his cronies, the Nagle brothers, treat the town as their personal fiefdom. Harun immediately establishes a sense of creeping dread: The town is adjacent to Highway 16, the so-called "Highway of Tears," along which women, mostly aboriginal, have been disappearing for decades. In short, this is not a friendly place.That's not to say that Leo Kreutzer, on whom Harun focuses, is without friends. Poor and marginalized--Leo is half-white, half-aboriginal--Leo and his friends cling all the more fiercely to one another. Family, too, is important: Leo's mother takes in her brother-in-law, the dying Uncle Lud, despite her husband's absence. Brother and sister Bryan and Ursie, orphans, maintain a semblance of family in their parents' decaying house. Tessa, on whom Leo has a crush, and Jackie, who works at the logging camp, round out the crew.What plot there is unravels messily and without tidy resolution, which, in that respect, mirrors real life. The novel opens with the group engaged in a favorite pastime, as they linger at the town dump, shooting rats and birds. Jackie introduces her friends to Hana Swann, a charismatic itinerant who also works in the logging camp's cafeteria. Swann, in contrast to Leo and his friends, is extremely pale, and her presence at once alluring and repellent: She shoots a marmot (a protected species). She challenges the friends to do something about Flacker, a notion that possesses Bryan and sets the plot in motion. Upon learning of Swann, Uncle Lud insists that Leo has met the "Snow Queen," a troublesome character known to Leo from the many folktales his uncle unspools. Readers may wonder at Swann's subsequent disappearance from the story, but she is like the "devil's hopscotch" to which Harun refers, a stray stone thrown in that scatters players in a variety of unexpected directions.A Man Came Out of the Door in the Mountain is really a story about stories, the ways in which we construct meaning by imposing a narrative on events. Indeed, much of the book consists of Leo's recollections after the fact, but related as present tense, a method that keeps the reader on his (and Harun's) hook. Leo receives e-mails from the instructor of the correspondence physics class his mother forced him into. The notes are strangely personal, as Leo's instructor explains that she attempted to study poetry at the graduate level but failed, and later turned to, and excelled at, science. Still, she quotes Leonard Cohen to Leo even as she analyzes his personality (with little to go on, as he is disengaged and sends her just one equation in which he proposes how one might quantify love). Science improves our lives, it provides us answers, but it can't generate meaning. Uncle Lud knows this intuitively, spinning folktales about a devil in which he doesn't really believe. Uncle Lud believes in stories, Leo tells readers. Of course, we readers believe in stories, too, or we wouldn't spend so many hours shushing our loved ones while we turn page after page. We may not take to heart the superstitious Catholic-aboriginal mishmash Leo's mom practices, but we understand her reasons. Like Uncle Lud, we know that there are very real devils in the world, and that sometimes only the context of fiction can make them real. A haunting novel with folkloric and magical realist elements, A Man Came Out of the Door in the Mountain is a debut not to be missed.
    • 5/5
      Adrianne Harun has nailed it!I live along Highway 16. Adrianne Harun has taken this "Highway of Tears" and created an amazing fantasy based on the disappearances of mostly aboriginal girls, a case that defies solving to this day. Mixing reality, myth, the plight of small logging towns in northern British Columbia, and the boredom of mixed-race youth and hopelessness of the poor, she has run with this fascinating story. Her descriptive prose, the stories told by Leo's Uncle Lud, and a man who is unknown yet known, and a mysterious young girl--is she really the Snow Woman?--all combine to make this story compelling. The devil has many faces.The characterizations and mindsets are spot on, too often found in these small one-store towns in the forests of British Columbia. Youngsters must work, alcoholism is rife, and in their free time make their own entertainment, whether good or bad. A group of friends stick together, surviving the odds. Adrianne has taken on these elements and many others to give us a mythical yet not unknown reality, mixed it up and turned out full-blown a novel we can feel. Sad though these stories are, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I was mesmerized and found it hard to put the book down, not wanting to lose a single thread. Remember her name, I'm sure we will be hearing it in the future.Review based on Advance Reading Copy (ARC)