Fiction Tuesday-Your house is on Fire

“After dark the scars in her face vanished, and her skin glowed very white, and she wrapped herself around me and demanded that I slap her face or hit her with my belt. Only when I obeyed her did she allow me to unbutton my pants.”

—	Your House is on Fire, Your Children All Gone by Stefan Kiesbye

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Your House is on Fire, Your Children All Gone by Stefan Kiesbye

Shirley Jackson meets The Twilight Zone in this riveting novel of supernatural horror

A village on the Devil‘s Moor: a place untouched by time and shrouded in superstition. There is the grand manor house whose occupants despise the villagers, the small pub whose regulars talk of revenants, the old mill no one dares to mention. This is where four young friends come of age—in an atmosphere thick with fear and suspicion. Their innocent games soon bring them face-to-face with the village‘s darkest secrets in this eerily dispassionate, astonishingly assured novel, infused with the spirit of the Brothers Grimm and evocative of Stephen King‘s classic short story “Children of the Corn” and the films The White Ribbon by Michael Haneke and Village of the Damned by Wolf Rilla. -Book Description

Doesn't she look like the girl from THE BAD SEED?

Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone has the flavor of a horror story, complete with the spectral creatures and gruesome events that fuel legends of the supernatural. Yet the most compelling horror is grounded in truth rather than legend. Stefan Kiesbye's novel addresses the horror of spite and malice, of mob violence, of child abuse and incest, of missing children, of kids being cruel for the sake of cruelty, of friends who betray each other for selfish ends, of homeless children who die in the cold for lack of charity. Who needs witches and werewolves when the world is filled with terrors like these?-TC

There's something so delightfully appalling about Stefan Kiesbye's YOUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE, YOUR CHILDREN ALL GONE. Reading the book is like watching the aftermath of a bad car accident; you know you should turn away and go about your business...but yet your eye lingers as you subtly try to catch a glimpse of something you know you shouldn't see. It's this wicked subconscious that beckons when you pick up this book. And there's absolutely no reason to resist the temptation, either; indulging in this book will satisfy every immoral craving you might have.-Matthew 

You will not find wailing demons, witches, imps and sprites and more potent evil spirits in this book, but you will find people who believe in those things, and you'll see how those beliefs shaped their behavior.-Mitch

I just can’t find a better word than “unsettling” for this novel; each chapter is more like a short story, all interconnected somewhere along the way. At times it’s hard to kept all he characters and their German names straight, and I feel Anke, in particular, was given short-shifted— her status at the beginning certainly accounts for much of it, but her life in the Big House could have been much better alluded to, and how it led to her final state…. Also, the late-in-book revelation of the town’s proximity to a concentration camp and the town’s utter indifference to it, was certainly par for the course for these self-centered sonsabitches, but felt a bit shoehorned in…- ItCameWithTheFrame

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