Bickle, Laura. The Hallowed Ones.

Bickle, Laura.    The Hallowed Ones.      Houghton Mifflin/ Graphia     311p $8.99    978-0-547-85926-2     2012  jr/sr       E-BN        Supernatural

This wholly unique novel tells the story a young Amish woman about to embark on her Rumspringa when a helicopter crashing in the cornfields and the concurrent disappearance of several members of the community cause the Elders to declare the community closed to all comings and goings.  Katie faces a more difficult challenge than missing out on her Rumspringa when she finds an injured young man at the border of their land and defies the Elders’ ruling to tend him, possibly putting everyone she knows in grave danger.

This book is deceptive.  It is not a typical “Amish girl goes out into the world, learns about herself and her faith and chooses to abandon/return to her community” story, although that is the impression it gives at the outset.  Keep reading, because the boy next door is not a sweetheart and the tattooed outsider is not a troubled high-school hooligan with a dark past and a heart of gold, just waiting to embrace the faith.  For that matter, there are reasons not to leave the farm that have nothing to do with the lure of the devil’s soda and movies.  People outside are not just disappearing, but dying horrible, gruesome deaths, and after the reader puts together the pieces it becomes apparent that someone has released a plague that essentially transforms people into thinking flesh-eaters who cannot set foot on holy ground.  In other words, this is a story about vampires, but it’s also a story about humanity, and Laura Bickle tells it masterfully.  This book contains elements of horror, but they’re fitting. One of the most amazing aspects of the novel is the believability of its characters. Katie is practical and straightforward about confronting the bloody aftermath of vampire attacks, and yet she remains very obviously a teenage girl with many of the same impulses, fears, and desires every other teenage girl on the planet feels.  Her clothing just doesn’t have zippers.  

Bickle’s research into the Amish lifestyle was obviously done carefully, and her treatment of the community is judicious, portraying its members as human beings rather than stereotypes.  This is the sort of book that should be published in hardcover so that it will have a better chance of surviving the abuse it will see when a reader carries it everywhere in order to read just a little more to see what surprises Bickle will introduce next.       

Amish–Fiction, Bioterrorism–Fiction, Horror stories       --Bethany Geleskie