John Langan: The Book I Would Like To Be Buried With…
The twenty-ninth Bury Me With features an author who has risen up the ranks of ghosty story-telling this last couple of years, John Langan…
“Buried in Albany. How appropriate that the book I’d like to have tucked inside my coffin with me begins with a ride in the back of a truck into a cemetery. William Kennedy’s Ironweed (1983) starts with its protagonist, Francis Phelan, shoveling dirt in St. Agnes Cemetery, outside Albany, NY, to pay off a debt. As Kennedy presents it, the cemetery is a place whose residents are aware of their visitors and can communicate with them silently; it’s a secular version of Dante (a quote from whose Purgatorio opens the novel). At the cemetery, Francis finds the grave of his infant son, Gerald, whose death he caused when he dropped the boy. Shame and guilt caused Francis to flee his action and his family, and he’s spent the decades since Gerald’s death as a wanderer, hopping trains, working odd jobs here and there, inevitably circling back to Albany before once more bolting from the site of his great failure. In front of Gerald’s grave, Francis begins to face up to his past, and his dead son places an obligation on him: to return home to the family he abandoned.
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