By Hugh Blanton

Lauren Bolger’s second novel, The Barre Incidents, takes place in Barre, New Hampshire near a massive granite quarry and the cemetery where most of the town’s residents who’ve passed on now rest in peace. Kara Lenker’s father, Jonathan, has recently died of silicosis, an affliction brought on after a lifetime of working in the quarry—he never did wear a mask while working, not even when they’d become mandated after it was discovered how toxic the mine dust really was. Kara is thirty-six years old and works as a waitress at a local bar/restaurant where she has a secret crush on one of the cooks, Alec. He’s got a secret crush on her, too, in fact they’ve both been crushing since high school. One of the bar regulars, Charlie Foley, is a retired miner who worked with Kara’s father and now keeps the patrons and staff of the bar entertained, and sometimes irritated, with his stories about the legends of Barre—ghosts of dead miners walking about at night, weird unexplainable things happening in the graveyard, and so on.

Jonathan was Jewish, his wife Lola is Christian, which presented a problem for funeral arrangements. Lola wanted to be the shomerim, sitting with the body overnight before the funeral, but shomerims are required to be Jewish. Kara tells how her mom convinced funeral home staff to let her do it anyway:

“Yeah, normally. But we’re talking about Lola Lenker, here. Tirelessly, she fought the funeral director for the         honor until he gave in. Made me bring her toothbrush and clean underwear for overnight. Then, an hour in, Dad’s body made a noise. And she freaked. Screamed bloody murder while the director was outside on a cigarette break. He called me, clearly rattled, and sent her straight home with her skivvies and her overnight things, like a kid who couldn’t handle their play date.” Kara sighed. “So she spent the weekend lamenting, and I planned everything myself.”

The “noise” wasn’t the last weird thing to happen. During a visit to her father’s grave, with Alec accompanying her, there was an earthquake. Granite statues breaking apart, the ground breaking open. They get back home—nobody else felt an earthquake. Maybe old Charlie’s crazy stories weren’t so crazy after all.

Bolger is well versed in folklore and mythology, and she really shows off her chops in Barre Incidents. American folklore legends Mothman and Indrid Cold take on central roles as does Nidhogg from ancient Norse mythology. Bolger cleverly blends it all together. Even the eyes of St. Lucy (St. Lucy’s eyes were gouged out prior to her execution for refusing to renounce her Christian faith) make an appearance here—recreated from the magic granite in the Barre mine. (In Bolger’s first book, Kill Radio, an old handmade crystal radio opens the portals of Hell and allows demons and hellhounds into our world.) She’s got a demented mind with a penchant for research—Dan Brown is undoubtedly seething with jealousy. Ivy Grimes of Writing Thoughts asked Bolger if Bolger has always been a fan of world mythology: “I do tend to gravitate towards that stuff a lot. The whole gods living among humans thing is really fun to write. I love how the stories can be so similar across cultures. Like the World Tree…And then I put some Judaism in the story as well.”

After the cemetery incident, more weird things begin happening in Barre and Kara discovers that the ring her father used to wear, a metal ouroboros with turquoise eyes, has something to do with it. It might be offering some kind of protection. The day after the earthquake in the cemetery, she meets back up with Alec to discover that his face appears to her as a bare skull. She flees in horror, but discovers later that when she wears the ring (as a necklace, it’s too large for her fingers), Alec’s face appears normal. Alec had been experiencing strange events as well, he appeared to enter a time warp while driving his car. Alec becomes too terrified to drive his car and starts bumming rides from people. Kara offers to wear her ring in his car while he drives to see if it will offer protection there as well, but Alec is unsure and reluctant to try it. However, Kara is persuasive and finally gets him to jump in the driver’s seat.

* * *

On November 2, 1966, Woodrow Derenberger, a sewing machine salesman in Parkersburg, West Virginia, held a press conference to inform the media that he had been visited by an extraterrestrial being from the planet Lanulos who identified himself and Indrid Cold. The story received national coverage and had both its doubters and believers. (Derenberger went on to say he’s taken several trips with Cold to Lanulos over subsequent months, causing even more doubt to be cast on his story.) On November 16th, 1966, the Point Pleasant Register, a daily newspaper for Point Pleasant, West Virginia, ran a story about a couple who claimed to have seen a “moth man”, something half moth and half man the night before. National newspapers picked up the story—doubters speculated that it was probably an out of migration heron. The two stories were apparently unrelated at the time, but both were collected later into the 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies by John Keel. Bolger melds them both together in The Barre Incidents, along with the ancient mythological figure Nidhogg, in what seems like an unlikely alliance. They want Kara’s ring.

After Kara tells Charlie of all the weirdness that’s been happening to her and Alec, Charlie tells her there’s one story he’s never told anybody before. In Charlie’s younger days, a boy was killed in the cemetery under mysterious circumstances. The boy had been chopping at a tree in the cemetery just prior to his death. The tree, as it turns out, is the World Tree, a tree that acts as a central axis connecting the heavens, the earth, and the underworld. In Norse mythology, the roots of the World Tree is where Nidhogg dwells, gnawing at the roots to hasten the destruction of the world. As Kara and Alec try to figure out why all this is happening to them, they lead themselves to the tree in the cemetery—and using the eyes of St. Lucy, they are able to see that there is a hole in the ground next to World Tree. Is it where all this has been coming from? Kara and Alec have little choice but to find out.

The Barre Incidents

by Lauren Bolger, 346 pages

Due from Malarkey books October 2025, $22.00