TITLE: A Scout is Brave
AUTHOR: Will Ludwigsen
155 pages, Lethe Press, ISBN 9781590216606 (softcover, e-book)
MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5
Will Ludwigsen’s new novella A Scout is Brave is almost too many things at once: young adult coming of age story (the narrator and main character is thirteen-year-old Bud Castillo), nostalgic historical (the time is 1963), a paean to the glory days of Scouting … and Lovecraftian eldritch horror. It almost shouldn’t work. In Ludwigsen’s deft hands, all the elements mesh for a story I couldn’t put down. I wasn’t surprised, of course. Ludwigsen’s Acres of Perhaps: Stories and Episodes is one of my favorite genre short story collections, and I will take any chance to tout it, including at the top of a review about a completely different book by the same author.
But let’s speak of A Scout Is Brave.
In the summer of 1963, Bud Castillo’s father loses his construction job in Queens NY. Just as the family is starting to worry about whether he’ll find work again, Bud’s father is offered an incredibly lucrative job: to help install and make operational an oil rig … off the coast of Massachusetts, near the small town of Innsmouth. Of course, weirdness is going to ensue. Bud finds he is the only kid in a town full of mostly elderly folks descended from the town’s original inhabitants … except for one other boy, Aubrey Marsh.
Readers of cosmic horror are well familiar with the history of Innsmouth, and with the Marsh family, as detailed in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth.” There have been countless pastiches, prequels, and sequels over the years, and yes, this is a sequel. One of the better ones, since Ludwigsen doesn’t try to imitate Lovecraft’s style, as so many of the writers who have visited Innsmouth in Lovecraft’s wake have. He tells the story in the simpler, less purple-prose, style of a man reminiscing about a year that changed his life. There’s no doubt, from the very first pages, that Bud and his family are walking into something they can’t imagine. The reader knows it, and the narrator, from his decades-later vantage point, knows it. Ludwigsen expertly portrays the language of someone whose fondest memories (of a friendship he’ll never experience again, of the time he came to understand his parents, and himself, better) are tinged with unimaginable horror.
The cosmic horror builds slowly: the little hints at the start, with descriptions of the odd behavior of the few returning residents of Innsmouth, slowly grow into scenes that are both rife with jump-scares (a visit to an abandoned hospital on the outskirts of town) and eerie cultish religious ceremony (when Bud’s family finally agrees to attend a service led by Reverand Pritchett at the Evangelical Progress Temple, the only church in town), which eventually lead to the story’s action-packed, frightening dénouement on ice-packed seas. The slow ratcheting up of the eeriness and the tension is perfectly paced. And what I find particularly brilliant is that the story feels Lovecraftian without ever actually teetering over into full on cosmic/eldritch horror.
These moments that teeter on, but never full embrace, the cosmic horror are interspersed with what I can only call a “skewed Rockwellian normalcy.” Bud meets Aubrey, introduces him to the concept of the Boy Scouts, they form a troop. They roam the town looking for good works to do, and through Bud’s eyes we get to meet the town’s denizens, most of whom have endearing, if odd, personalities, and who become the boys’ de facto teachers in whatever subjects they are expert it, since Innsmouth doesn’t have a school. I was a Cub Scout, a Webelo, and made it through a couple of years of Boy Scouts before the unexpected passing of a favorite Scoutmaster. I recognize Bud’s idealized attitude of “what Scouts should be,” and his joy at finding someone who embraced it in the same way. I also recognized the tint of nostalgia in older Bud’s narration – a tint that doesn’t quite cover up the things he’s learned since leaving Innsmouth, the scars that belie some of the nostalgia.
There’s also some insightful commentary about the negative aspects of nostalgia (through the citizens of Innsmouth who cannot move on even though they were left behind) and charismatic leaders who will say anything and do to get their way.
A Scout Is Brave is a perfect mix of nostalgia, horror, coming-of-age, and social commentary. It is going to be on my list of favorite reads of 2024.
