INTRODUCTION

Let me begin by saying this: I’ve never actually met Philip Fracassi, but I’ve known him forever.

It’s hard to explain, how a couple of phone conversations or a story exchange can engender such a sense of another person: their talent, their work ethic, their ambition. Thousands of miles may separate us, but somehow, despite all the reasons it’s absurd to claim so, I think of Philip as kin. Read his blog and you’ll see: his struggles are every writer’s struggle, his dreams every writer’s dream, and his victories, yes, are every writer’s victory.

Because, let’s face it, we’re all of us richer for his work.

Take Boys in the Valley. The set-up is pure horror: an unknown evil infests a group of young boys in an isolated orphanage in rural Pennsylvania. In lesser hands, this could easily be an off-putting tale of exploitative violence. But Philip’s is a sure and steady hand, and his execution of that premise is extraordinary. Think Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door. Here is a book that confronts our worst cruelties, without flinching, and demands answers to the great questions that plague our spirits. What is evil? Is it benign neglect, malicious intent? Some deeper, more incomprehensible darkness? Do we, as humans, possess a light strong enough to overcome such darkness? Where is God in all this? For us, against us?

It’s a book that puts me in mind of two other great works: William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus. In Golding’s novel, a group of boys stranded on a deserted island fashion their own doomed civilization and sink quickly into depravity. In Powell and Pressburger’s film, a group of nuns are stationed high in the Himalayas and find themselves haunted by their own earthbound desires. Both works suggest that our environment has a hand in driving us crazy, but also that our own doom is somehow inherent to “some final, rebellious act of the haunted flesh,” to borrow a phrase from Boys in the Valley.

And yet: Philip’s book offers as much hope as despair. In my favorite passage in the novel, Father Andrew tells our hero, Peter, a young candidate for the priesthood, that “the discovery of Christ is not found in a darkened room … It’s found in the light. God is not found through escape from a distant place, but through the arrival of where you already are.” (Sometimes, as a writer, you read a passage in a book so achingly beautiful and perfect you wish you’d written it. Other times, you surrender to the realization that you’re not even capable of writing something that good. So it goes here.)

I could go on about Boys in the Valley—its language, its humanity, its compassion—but that would only delay your experience of reading it, which will be, by turns, gut-wrenching, terrifying, heartbreaking, and sublime.

In many ways, it feels like Philip Fracassi has always been here, working quietly among us, book after book, story after story. I hope he always is—in part because, one day, I hope to meet the guy out in sunny Los Angeles and buy him a beer, to tell him what his work has meant to me these last few years. But mostly because, these days, our world needs all the hope it can get, and as long as there are writers like Philip Fracassi toiling in the light, the darkness cannot overcome us.

Andy Davidson

Cochran, Georgia

February 10, 2021



1

St. Vincent’s Orphanage

Delaware County, Pennsylvania. 1905.

“Peter, wake up.”

I open my eyes to the familiar.

White walls. Two rows of metal-framed beds. Bleached pine floor. Bright pale light bursting from large, uncovered windows that line the east-facing wall. Two large, arched oak doors at the far end of the long room are closed. The winking glimmer of the polished iron cross that hangs above them a constant sentinel. Always watching.

Simon pokes me in the shoulder. “Wake up. You’re having a nightmare.”

I sit up, rub my eyes. Most of the kids are still asleep, so it must be early. Not yet six.

“I’m up,” I say, and shove Simon gently back toward his cot. He laughs and sits down on his mattress, looking out the large window between our beds.

“Might snow today,” he says excitedly, as if that’s a good thing.

“Too soon.” I yawn and stretch. It’s icy cold in the dorm. My thin robe is balled up at my feet and I pull it on over my wool pajamas, which I’ve long grown out of, annoyingly exposing my ankles and wrists. I slip my feet into shoes and follow Simon’s stare through the glass.

The sky outside is white as bone and just as hard. I stand up to get a better look at the grounds.

The surrounding trees are leafless and gray. They look dead and withered. The earth is a wealth of weedy grass that, in the dim light, looks as gray as the trees. Colorless. The barn that holds our horses, sheep, and goats sits to the south. Ahead is the field we’ll be working that morning, pulling what we can from the earth and storing it for the winter, which I’ve heard will be long and harsh. I wonder if any of the boys will die before spring shows its face again, and say a silent prayer for all of them.

I glance at the metal wind-up clock on my dresser—the only furniture we’re allowed—and see it’s a few minutes before six. I’m the only one who has a personal clock, and it’s the only thing I have left from my childhood, my prior life; the only thing I saved when I fled the burning house.

I push in the knob on the clock’s alarm, disabling it. No need to hear the shrill bell to wake me. My memories serve well enough to break my sleep.

“Go wash, Simon. And take Basil with you.”

Basil, a small, sickly, black-haired English boy not even ten years old, watches me and Simon from across the room with wide owl-eyes. He is already fully dressed.

“Oh, why, Peter?”

“Because he’s up and ready.”

I watch them as they trudge out the dorm toward the washroom. I study the others in the early-morning light, curious if anyone else has woken.

It seems my nightmare didn’t disturb the others, and I feel badly for rousing Simon. But it’s near dawn now, and Poole will be ringing first bell shortly, expecting us to be dressed and ready before the subsequent bell ten minutes after.


Copyright © 2021 by Philip Fracassi

Introduction copyright © 2021 by Andy Davidson