Spark, by Courtney Elizabeth Mauk

Spark, Courtney Elizabeth Mauk

Engine Books, 2012

ISBN 978-1-938126-04-8

— ♦ —

Delphie could not have set the fires in Queens.  When examined calmly, rationally, the lines do not connect. But the suggestion alone is enough.

As afternoon stretches into evening, the ruined building becomes the ruined house and the names form again, unwanted. The Greenes trail me through the apartment. They are the pads of my bare feet on the kitchen floor, the faucet turning on, the splash of water, the clank of a pot against the stove. I open the window, and they become the bark of a dog, the slam of a car door, a child’s sing-song voice.

Courtney Elizabeth Mauk’s debut novel SPARK (Engine Books, 2012) is as mesmerizing as the flame of the match that in one terrifying and terrible moment took the lives of an innocent family and forever transformed young Andrea and her older brother Delphie.

Now, many years later, Delphie has been released on probation and the only place he can go is to the small Brooklyn apartment Andrea shares with her boyfriend, Jack. It’s a complicated arrangement, but Andrea and Delphie’s sibling relationship was complicated from the start: Andrea was conceived to be a bone marrow donor to save Delphie from a life-threatening anemia.  There is a great burden in being born to save another, and an equal and opposite burden in being the saved; as she once again becomes responsible for Delphie, Andrea is both desperate to help him and simultaneously terrified that she will fail to protect him or the world from the pyromania she fears cannot be cured.

Spark’s exploration of Andrea and Delphie’s unusually entwined relationship is at once compelling and thrilling. Mauk considers sibling love, admiration, and resentment with insight and compassion, and with prose that is accessibly lovely. But what makes the novel especially riveting is a suspenseful crescendo of doubt and fear. As a rash of unsolved warehouse fires breaks out in Brooklyn, Andrea’s suspicions become debilitating:  Andrea and Jack’s relationship unravels under the pressure; Andrea’s friendship with a charming elderly actress becomes increasingly strained, and Andrea is emotionally seduced by the enchanting and elusive Sally, a mysterious woman who seems to magically appear whenever she is most needed.

As the story unfolds, Mauk gives the reader fodder to fuel our own doubts and fantasies, not only about Delphie but about Andrea herself, and this for me was the most exquisite part of Spark. My imagination began to run wild entertaining the questions and possibilities, and I enjoyed every delicious moment of it, turning the pages more and more quickly, and eventually going back to reread the second half of the book to consider it all once again.  It’s an exciting read, and an exciting debut – absolutely striking in its concept and execution.

Highly recommended.