Craig Dilouie

Craig DiLouie is not new to stories in which children are the victims of harrowing circumstances: from the rejected mutants in One of Us, to the child soldiers in Our War to the young members of a religious cult in The Children of Red Peak, he often places the ordeals of the younger generations at the heart of his stories. With Suffer the Children he does something different, though, because here the parents are the ones whose anguish and pain are front and center, even though their children are the ones who start as the victims.

The novel is written in the form of a chronicle of events focused on the outbreak of Herod’s Syndrome, an out-of-the-blue affliction targeting pre-pubescent children all over the world: the children are taken suddenly ill, first losing consciousness and then dying, with no apparent medical cause. As the story starts, it’s 24 hours before the onset of Herod, and the countdown marked as we meet the major players in the story sets the overall narrative tone, which is that of impending, unavoidable disaster.

Joan and her husband Doug are a couple who struggles a little in making ends meet: he works in the sanitation department and she keeps a small private child care, where her own two children, Nate and Megan, play with friends. Ramona is a single mother, very devoted to her son Josh, who is one of Joan’s kindergarten kids; David and Nadine, a doctor and his wife, are still battling with the aftermath of their son’s death; and then there is Shannon, one of David’s patients and a young expectant mother. All of them will be affected, each in their own way, by the onset of Herod, and the story is told through their unique points of view.

The world-wide tragedy has a devastating impact on society, not least because of the staggering amount of dead bodies that Herod left in its wake: the description of the hurried mass graves being excavated to deal with the situation and of the grief-stricken parents being unable to properly lay their children to rest is heart-rending, but it’s nothing when confronted with the shock of seeing those dead young people return to life just a few days after their demise. The parents whose children were buried or still waiting for burial see their offspring move toward home on their own power, and those whose kids were either cremated or subjected to autopsies are hit by a renewed wave of grief.

But the “miracle”, as inexplicable and frightening as it is, does not last long: after a while the children fall again into a comatose state, and it’s only a fortuitous accident that reveals how the ingestion of blood is the only way to insure a few hours of “life” in the resuscitated kids. And it’s here that civilization starts to unravel, because the children require constant amounts of blood to return to life, and parents’ and relatives’ donations can only go so far. At this point it’s not difficult to imagine how things move from bad to worse, all societal rules and mores subverted by the parents’ need to keep their children “alive” a few hours more - and that’s not all, since the kids seem to be changing, losing their sense of self together with their memories, and becoming somewhat feral. And given the way they are able to survive, it’s not difficult to imagine what ensues….

While reading, I often thought that Suffer the Children could be likened to the proverbial train wreck one observes, knowing that it’s going to be a devastating accident but unable to take one’s eyes away from it. That’s the way I felt throughout the novel: equally fascinated and appalled, sorrowful and terrified, and I have to admit that the main reason I was able to stay for the course was Craig DiLouie’s writing: distant, almost clinical, but at the same time able to convey the poor parents’ terrible dilemma of having to balance their own survival with that of their children. The descriptions of the symptoms of constant blood loss are relayed with scientific accuracy and tempered with the adults’ heart-wrenching joy in those handfuls of hours they are able to spend with their kids.

What made the impact of this story so intense for me was the realization that the progressive unraveling of our society, as described here in the aftermath of Herod’s passage, is all too believable, that civilization is, after all, only a thin layer covering our most feral instincts, our propensity to be homo homini lupus, given the right circumstances. And it’s a chillingly sobering realization.

Suffer the Children is not an easy read, and I know that some of my fellow bloggers will find it hard - if not impossible - to approach it, but if you can overcome that very understandable bias you will find a compellingly written story that is more than worth reading.… (altro)