Review: Let Gravity Seize the Dead

A Place Holds Memories
Review: Let Gravity Seize the Dead

​​Rachel Yuro

Darrin Doyle
Novel
Regal House Publishing, pp. 141
Cost: $17.95

“The forest wears perfume. You’ve smelled it: sun-baked pine, heady as fresh bread. Forest dresses stout in summer, all kinds of layers. Then she strips naked in winter—the opposite of people. Forest sings and sighs, moans and hums. Voices legion, connected millions: leaves in windblown tremble; gray-brown trunks hushed as soldiers, some kissed by sun, some drowned in shadow; rain whisper and thunderbowl” (32).

It is evident that Darrin Doyle, author of the book Let Gravity Seize the Dead has a deep appreciation for nature. He describes the outdoors with such detail and respect you feel that you are deep in the thick of it. He speaks of it with human-like qualities, as if it were a living, breathing person with a past and feelings. And while these aspects give the book life and beauty, Doyle’s novel also evokes a sense of eeriness that leaves the reader with a chill that is hard to shake even after the words on the page end. This chill gets even more sinister as past and present intertwine and weave a story that transcends beyond time, leaving us encased in these vivid descriptions of nature with the question: “why?”

The story takes place at the Randall cabin four-miles distant from Wolfolk, Michigan, the nearest small town. The cabin, encased by evergreens and isolated from the outside world, was passed down from generations, but had stood empty for decades. “Trees stood close-woven, even when hardwoods lost their leaves. Lean pines, black and jack, formed dark mazes, needle beds soft in their perpetual shade. Armies of that pine flanked the plot that Beck Randall’s great-grandparents had cleared in 1900” (1). The cabin was first owned by Loren and Betty Randall centuries before new entities took ownership and served as an escape from their tumultuous pastas a fresh start (or so they thought). They had two children there, Bernie and Lucille, who also suffered from their own fair share of anguish. After Lucille, the last remaining relative, passed away the cabin was then passed onto her son, father of Beck Randall. While Lucille’s son wanted nothing to do with the cabin, Beck Randall, her great-grandson, was eager to buy it from his father, despite his father’s warnings of what had happened there. Without ever really knowing why, Beck “forces” his wife Mallory, and their two daughters Lucy and Tina to drop their lives in the city during the middle of the school year, to move to a cabin deep in the woods of rural Michigan. Despite Beck’s urgency to move into his great-grandmother's cabin, he can’t pinpoint a rational reason as to why he should. 

Doyle writes, “He didn’t understand, didn’t feel called to understand, the reasons behind his compulsion to spend their savings on the remote cabin and acreage. Didn’t understand why he was willing to quit a stable career designing, installing, and updating lighting systems in retirement homes, community centers, hospitals. Didn’t understand why his resolve invigorated when Lucy begged him to let her finish high school before they moved” (22).

The book flips between telling the story of the first generation of Randall’s who lived there, and this present-day generation, and as the story progresses, striking resemblances emerge between the two timelines. The readers start to understand the reason for certain absurdities and how trauma can be passed from one generation to another. One particular catalyst for the trauma carried by the Randall family, is the woods surrounding the cabin and a certain entity that resides within called “the whistler” that sounds a sad and tuneful melody that signifies when death is upon them. It is a melody similar to a bird’s, if only it didn’t solely sound at night. The “whistler” symbolizes inherited trauma or epigenetics, the study of how the environment can alter genes, as it inhabited the very same place for generations, unwaveringly. Now that history has repeated itself, the trauma that lingers within the Randall family will continue on, until it is broken.

Overall the sense of place, the woods surrounding the cabin, is the only thing that is constant between the two timelines, and the way it is personified and talked about is the thing that saves this particular book from being put back on the shelf. The story surrounding the book, although unique, is not what makes it great. What really defines this book is the interconnectedness between place and trauma and how Doyle relates the two so poetically, pointing out not only the beauty of nature but of its humanity. He reminds us that, most often, the answers to all questions can be found in the past or by looking at the “roots.”

“We’re same as trees, Lucille. Want to know a tree, check underground. Want to know a person, look under the soil. That’s where the story is. Roots. That’s what says how high, how strong, how rotten” (pp. 41).