Of Course It's a Mess

Spontaneous by Aaron Starmer
New York, NY : Dutton Books, [2016]
355 p. ; 22 cm.

A bloody mess actually, because what else would you expect when living people suddenly (or should I say spontaneously) explode into a mess of liquefied body parts and fluids?   

The beginning of Spontaneous reminds me a bit of Gone by Michael Grant, in that an ordinary day at a high school becomes anything but normal with a shocking turn of events.  In this case it's when one the seniors in the school spontaneously combusts during a class.  When this is followed by many more single and multiple combustions over the course of the novel things get very crazy, and very disturbing.

I liked the first three-fourths of this novel pretty well.  The premise is a real hook for readers and by telling it all from the viewpoint of one of the smart and grim-humored characters - Mara Carlyle - the novel moves along at a raucous, albeit grotesque pace.  Of course, the government gets involved, theories of causes emerge, the town in New Jersey where it happens is first the scene of a media frenzy, and then quarantined - all the while the hapless senior class that is being afflicted by this tragedy is trying to figure out how to keep living and keep finding meaning in life.  Part of that search revolves around friendships, family, and the sweet romance between the main character and the quirky but nice young man, Dylan.

The challenge of this novel is where to go with it.  And in that I found it not as good as I hoped.  There is a bizarre character, FBI agent Carla Rosetti who by the end of the novel has gone strangely rogue.  There is a friend who's fate is a mystery - was her end a dream or did she escape or something else? There are many unanswered questions.  I didn't expect the novel to tie up all its loose ends, or have a happy ending, but it felt to me like the storyline simply got the best of the author who couldn't figure out a satisfactory ending and so let it just kind of fizzle out.

All in all, I'd recommend it to a student who wants a bizarre story and who won't mind finishing a book while still having a lot of unanswered questions.  Besides, the writing is fresh and interesting and the novel conjures up a lot of questions about mortality, meaning and how one should live in the face of imminent dangers - a parable for our own dangerous times, perhaps.