Which, perhaps, is what Evenson was driving at.
The Open Curtain follows Rudd Theurer, a Mormon teenager who becomes fascinated with a murder committed by the grandson of Brigham Young. Yet everywhere he turns, whether trying to do a research paper on the murder, or coming to grips with his father's suicide, Rudd runs into the same thing: silence and secrecy.
Evenson thrives on this secrecy. From the hidden undergarments given to Mormons at the Temple, to the new secret name given in the same place, to the secrecy of a ritual known as blood sacrifice, we experience a duality of everything: what is seen and what is not. If you've read Under the Banner of Heaven, by Jon Krakauer, you understand the violence at the fringes of religion (or if you've heard of words such as crusades or jihad) and Evenson walks us straight into this violence, watching as it slowly consumes Rudd's life and those around him. While few condone religious violence, Evenson shows us one way that it can happen, the secrecy and confusion that surround it.
As a reader, you'll have to work: Evenson dives so deeply into fragmented psyches that it's a struggle to keep up at times, but the work gets paid off when the pieces click into place. It will chill you. At no point do we step away from the story of Rudd, as he becomes a victim himself, almost dying in the killings that took Lyndi's family, as he performs a veiled threat in a bizarre temple scene, or as he continues to lose himself and disappear from his own psyche.
Evenson touches on a large variety of themes: the desire to belong, family secrets, truth, pain, loss, history. Through it we're continually reminded of the duality: belonging with someone yet not quite, truth or the appearance of truth, or history as it repeats itself. Evenson does this well because he understands the world well: that it is good and bad all around us, even within our own hearts. And through it, he shows the potential danger of potent secrets, the inherent need for disclosure and openness even at the heart of a religion. For at the heart is where the most power lies.
Read this aware that it is, obviously, a quite violent book, from a writer traditionally in the horror vein. But the violence is not gratuitious for its own sake, but rather for the sake of bringing dark things to the light.
I wonder if the traveling Mormons on my doorstep know of such stories, such warnings. Doubtless all religions need them. Or the best of us, as Yeats wrote, will lack all conviction, while the worst will be full of such passionate intensity.
