Review: The Storm at the Door by Stefan Merrill Block

Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: Random House (June 21, 2011)
ISBN-10: 1400069459
Source: Publisher

The Storm at the Door is Stefan Merrill Block’s fictionalized version of his grandparents’ life, written as a means to comprehend his grandfather’s  mental illness and the effect this had on his family for generations to come.

The novel opens in Echo lodge.  Katharine (the author’s grandmother), now suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s,  is reminiscing on her life with her husband, Frederick.  After all these years, she has decided to destroy the letters Frederick wrote to her while institutionalized at The Mayflower Home.

“…if we do not deliberately inventory and organize, unwanted things will simply persist.  Memory can be a willful power, but we must always be vigilant.”

 

She burns the letters:

For minutes, she watches the fire articulating Frederick’s words into something else, a plume of white, sucking upward.  The transformation is both simple and impossible.  A moment ago they were words, considered and set; now they are a rising whiteness.  Now they could have been anything.

Frederick was admitted to Mayflower after flashing the drivers on a major thoroughfare. This was the last straw for Katharine; in the years since they married, Frederick’s eccentric behavior continued on a downward spiral.  He would stay out late drinking, or disappearing for days.  He would come home smelling of bourbon, and sometimes other women, and Katharine couldn’t bear to continue to live this way.

Their children, while still young, were not ignorant to their father’s behavior.  When one of their daughters opened the front door to find Frederick standing there:

She pulled it open, and the father she had known had vanished.  In Daddy’s place was a monstrous thing.  It was the first time I (Frederick) knew, entirely, that I had failed.  She looked at me and I knew she saw I was not myself, that there was no myself.

 

Rather than succumbing to the word around him, Frederick decides to turn his stay into a creative exercise, finding the art within each of the numerous incidents that pop up during this stay. Instead, he falls into a deeper depression, questioning how he managed to exist in his current life.

The chapters alternate between Katharine and Frederick. We learn of Katharine’s own feeling of loss and depression, craving the “old” Frederick:

It seems to Katharine now that she has spent all of this time loving and grasping not for the real Frederick but for just another Frederick, a trickster spirit who takes occasional possession of her husband’s body, just long enough for a few sweet or needy moments, a loving week or two, just enough to keep Katharine’s faith in his existence.

Through the alternating chapters, readers experience Frederick’s incarceration in Mayflower, not only through his eyes and experiences, but Katharine’s as well.

A monumental scene in the book occurs when Frederick witnesses an act he shouldn’t have, an act that completely changes his outlook on his life at Mayflower.  After this act, he slowly begins to wonder if he will ever escape the horrible, tortured world of the Mayflower home.

Simultaneously, Katharine is going through her own moment of “rediscovery.”  When she had Frederick admitted, she had the support of her family.  Now, months later, their savings account dwindled, she’s lost the support of her family.  She realizes her actions have potentially caused more damage than ever imagined, wondering how much she did to cause the behavior Frederick has exhibited all these years.

The Storm at the Door, due to its “real-life” inspiration, is a emotional, heart-wrenching novel examining the results of mental illness, real or not, to one family.  Despite the extremely flawed characters, one can’t help but feel great sympathy for them.  This book, due to its subject matter, is not a light read, nor is it one that can be read at a fast pace.

While I was completely enamored by this book, due to the density of this book, I can’t say that I recommend this to everyone.  Fans of literary fiction with rich characters would appreciate this book. Certainly not a beach read, but one that will make you think, and leave you thinking long after the book has ended.

Thank you to TLC book tours for giving me the opportunity to review this book.  Please be sure to check out the other stops on this tour: