Dead Fall Review

  Deadfall review

 

Dead Fall  By Stephen Wallenfels focuses on the point of view of Cory Bic whose past story is given in a third person narrated account, and whose present is narrated by himself. The book starts off with Cory and his twin brother Ty on their birthday as their father, in one of his better moods, decides to let the boys in on a guarded secret of his.  He takes them to a few stops in the woods before arriving at normal looking clearing with a stump in the middle. However, underneath is an abandoned living space dug out long ago and whose entrance is through the stump. They dub the place “Stumptown” and their father talks about how they will someday come up there and live free and happy, detached from the world. He talks about how he is planning on changing for the better, but soon afterwards, he seems to take a step in the opposite direction. He moves them to a new town, for a sketchy job, to live in a worn out house. Here he joins ranks with his sketchy business partners, who treat the twins like trash and whose plan for their father is much more devastating. However, the repercussions do not stop there, as their father’s enemies believe the twins owe them as well.

Focusing on the more present narration of Cory, through the following series of events the twins try to return to their conveniently secluded and secrete, “Stumptown”. Driving through the forest they happen upon a dead deer and tire tracks on the decline from the road to the creek. Going down to see if anyone is wounded, they find a severely hurt girl in the back of the trunk with zip ties around her wrists. Seeing that the driver escaped and later the beam of his flashlight in the distance, the brothers decide to split up. Cory, who had taken a first aid class would go with the girl while Ty would try to lead him away. The girl’s name is Astrid, and after deciding to trust Cory, puts up a valiant effort against her pain to keep moving to “Stumptown''. Although mute, she and Cory become friends as they try to combat their harsh circumstance, and hope that everything will turn out all right despite her wounds, her captor, their dwindling water supply and Ty’s uncertain and endangered safety.

Overall, I found the book to be good. I found most of the characters to be fairly interesting, but lack much and other than Cory and Astrid .Ty consistently stayed the pretty easily angered jock who was protective of Cory. Although he did mention going to anger management therapy in one point of the book and that it helped him, Cory continually mentioned trying to talk carefully in order not to anger his brother. However, I found his character rather entertaining to read about, as his standoffishness could provide humor at times. For example, when he took one bite out of  all of the cops donuts before putting the sampled doughnut back into the box. The twins father, Benny, is continually a jerk towards his sons and seems to keep the pattern of making promises to his sons and then not following through. The antagonists just seemed solely greedy and corrupt consistently among the steady characteristics of other comparatively minor characters. The biggest change seems to occur in Cory who goes from extremely non-confrontational, probably due to his father’s maltreatment of him, to undertaking multiple acts of defiance which I do not think that he would be quite capable of in the beginning of the book. Although, in those acts of defiance he usually tries to not to stick around for his target’s reaction or any resulting immediate revenge. However, I think kind of seems more in line with his character as he seems both non-confrontational and pretty smart. In addition, he goes through the physical change of getting fitter in order for his plan to work. He also seems to become more open towards people, where at the beginning of the book it seemed like his sole friend was Ty. However he is consistently kind, and pushes himself to be brave despite his many worries and fears. He also gets insulted a lot in the book, but usually seems to keep a cool head. Astrid’s main point of growth as a character seems to be her ability to open up and continue past trauma, being mute and extremely fearful from her past, but she eventually learns to trust Cory and somehow is able to communicate with him. 

As far as writing style and voice goes, I really like some of his description due to the imagery he provides, and I think his writing flows nicely.  One example is when he says “The fog-drenched silence creeps in from the trees, coils in our headlights and curls over the big rock where the trunk of the car is resting”. I also like how the author switches between first person in the future and third person for the past because with first person you can only know what the character sees, and in the past to further distinguish its ability to gain perspective it is not limited to the immediate knowledge which is kind of represented through first person narration. The plot itself was pretty good, although some topics were a little intense. I really liked how the author could keep me in suspense and successfully hint at how there may be more to a situation that meets the eye, which was really effective in adding to my inability to put the book down at times. I thought the pacing was good and I did not find very many slow parts. Overall, I would give this book a 8 of 10 stars due to how 2D the characters could feel at times and because I have read some really good books (in my humble opinion), and afterwards most books pale a little in comparison. However, the book could be pretty entertaining at times and was overall a pretty interesting read.

 

-Annie