Of a Fire Beyond the Hills: A Novel Based on News Stories

Ernest Hekkanen

New Orphic Publishers

Ernest Hekkanen’s lat­est book, Of a Fire Beyond the Hills: A Novel Based on News Stories (New Orphic Publishers), revolves around a dis­placed mon­u­ment that com­mem­o­rates U.S. draft dodgers and deserters. The author/narrator agrees to give the statue a home in his front yard on a quaint cul-de-sac in Nelson, B.C. Then all hell breaks loose, and Hekkanen becomes the recip­i­ent of anony­mous, creepy phone calls, bro­ken liv­ing room win­dows, hate mail and even a cur­sory dis­cus­sion of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Remember that old one-liner, “Even para­noids have real enemies”? When you’re in the narrator’s posi­tion of not know­ing who your friends are or which ene­mies are tail­ing you, there is no bet­ter way to describe the atmos­phere. Hekkanen cap­tures the daily minu­tiae of life in a small town, a delight­ful every­day life that could tip off bal­ance at any time. To make mat­ters worse, tourists from down south hear of the war resisters’ mon­u­ment and mouth off right to the author’s face. “I lost a good friend over in Iraq, and let me tell you this right now, Mr. Sissy Pants — if you were liv­ing down in America where I come from, you’d get tarred and feath­ered for being an Al-Qaeda sym­pa­thizer.” Some of this men­tal­ity reminds me of what Henry Miller said fifty years ago: we ban the sale of fire­crack­ers to kids but mean­while it’s okay to stock­pile atom bombs. For the folks out there who are indif­fer­ent to what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, this book seems to whis­per, “Stop eat­ing your grilled Gruyère cheese with Roma toma­toes and red onion on open-face sour­dough long enough to read me, if you please.”