"Where Things Come Back" by John Corey Whaley

A while back a few friends of mine decided they wanted to raise chickens, so they ordered some from the internet (as one does).  Two of the chickens turned out to be roosters, which they took it upon themselves to announce to the world every day, multiple times per day, usually in the morning when human beings prefer to be asleep.  They also took to harassing the hens, as roosters apparently will do if they don't have a ton of room to roam around (these particular birds are being raised in a vacant lot on 24th St. in the Westside neighborhood).  They would jump all over the hens, prevent them from eating, and otherwise act like jerks.  In other words, these roosters had to go.

Now as you may or may not recall, a few months ago we butchered a pig in the library.  My friend Adam is one of the butchers who put on the event for us.  When he got wind of this rooster situation, Adam invited us over for a home-cooked chicken dinner at which he would solve this rooster problem once and for all, farm-to-table style.  Or, in this case, urban-KCMO-to-table style.

I will spare you (most of) the gory details.  Suffice it to say that the knife pressure required to slit a rooster's throat and the pressure required to cut its head completely off are very similar.  The first rooster's final minutes were about as peaceful as you could hope for them to be.  Adam is a firm but gentle hand, and he even spoke to the rooster before dispatching it, thanking it for what it was about to provide and wishing him luck wherever he was going.  A few seconds of kicking and the rooster was gone.

The second rooster was not quite so fortunate.  After some similar thoughtful words, Adam took the knife to him and his head popped right off.  The thing immediately started flapping and running in place (it was being held down by another friend, who had raised the roosters from eggs, and whose horror I cannot imagine).  It was thrashing around with such force that when the wings hit the plastic table it sounded not unlike the SWAT team demanding entrance into a house.  BOOM BOOM BOOM.

Here is something you may not have known:  being headless does not stop a rooster from vocalizing.  So not only was this dead rooster attempting to get up and run away from us, it was also trying to crow.  For the next few minutes I was the world's strictest vegetarian.  I have rarely made as firm of a resolution as I did there, in that alley, to never eat chicken again (note: I ate this exact chicken not 30 minutes later).

Oh, and chickens can also still poop when they're dead.  Heads up for that.

Anyway, the plot of Where Things Come Back revolves around a disappearance and a reappearance.  Gabriel Witter, the fifteen-year-old brother of the story's narrator, Cullen Witter, has vanished without a trace from his hometown of Lily, Arkansas.  Almost simultaneously, a giant woodpecker thought to have been extinct for decades is sighted in the woods outside of Lily by an outsider named John Barling.   In a parallel plot, a young missionary named  Benton Sage struggles with his faith and searches for a purpose in life.  (All the characters' names in this book are ridiculous.  Benton Sage's roommate is named Cabot Searcy.)

Mostly, the book is about trying to make sense out of death, and of life.  The book opens with the death of Cullen and Gabriel's cousin Oslo (seriously?  Oslo?) from a drug overdose.  One of the main female characters, Ada Taylor, tends to have boyfriends that either die or manage to seriously injure themselves.  The parallel plot features a suicide that throws the life of his friend into a tailspin and a desperate search for meaning in existence.

I have to confess, I didn't like this book at first.  I was convinced that I was in for yet another retreading of the angst-filled first-person teenage novel.  Where Things Come Back is much better than that.  It deals with life, death, and the middle space in between (for most of the book, we don't know if Gabriel is alive or dead) in a way that is honest and sober.  It avoids magnifying the emotions of the characters into melodrama, which I always appreciate and honestly think is usually unnecessary, since death is profound enough when you really stop and think about it.

Where Things Come Back is also a very well-constructed book.  The "will they find Gabriel" storyline and the "will they find the woodpecker" storyline play off each other nicely.  There is some symbolism in the book that I thought was a little ham-handed (the woodpecker is called the Lazarus Woodpecker) I'm sure it sounds better if you're not such a cranky reader.

At the end of the day, I thought Where Things Come Back did a really good job of addressing really complex topics and creating three-dimensional characters, and I recommend it, especially if you want to do a little deep thinking about death and loss after having witnessed a bird die, seemingly come back to life, die again, be stripped of half its feathers, and then poop all over the table.