Colin's depressed father, Alan, shoots himself. No spoiler alert needed, as the suicide is recounted in the first sentence of "Some Hell," Minneapolis writer Patrick Nathan's darkly absorbing debut novel.
Like one of those stubbornly inclement fall days only intermittently punctuated with patches of blue sky and sunshine, "Some Hell" declines to subscribe to the "it gets better" impulse.
The application of love, therapy, insight and time's healing quality is, in this story, a weakling against the tenacious bully that is death, shame, anger, grief, guilt.
Colin lives in Roseville with his self-destructive mother, Diane; an autistic older brother, Paul; and a pot-smoking older sister, Heather.
Nathan concentrates on how Colin, age 12 at the outset, and Diane find paths forward after Alan's suicide in a basement office where he had been writing in journals and researching who-knows-what for more than a year. A plot circumstance leaves Colin also feeling guilty.
The bond between gay boys (Colin knows this about himself, although he hasn't yet had any experience) and their mothers is often said to be close. Colin and Diane's love-hate relationship, typical in many ways, is deepened by their bewilderment, anguish and despair.
At Alan's funeral, Colin realizes "that he and his mother were alone, in their shared way."
Colin and Diane read Alan's obscure journal entries, finding few obvious clues as to what drove him to kill himself.
