Telescopes and caterpillars

AerospaceFest 2024 brings all kinds of STEM

By Zachary Lewis
[email protected]

The Hippo recently spoke with Katie Marinoff-Silk, the Director of Development at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, about this year’s AerospaceFest, the center’s yearly family festival, which blasts off on Saturday, Sept. 21, from 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.
“AerospaceFest is our annual celebration of all things STEM,” Marinoff-Silk said. “So we bring various science and education organizations from around the state. We invite them to come set up booths at our museum, both inside and outside, just to share what they do with our community.”
Granite Staters will not need to spend a penny to get inside. “It’s the third Saturday in September every year. And admission is free. We do have a suggested donation of five to 10 dollars,” she said.
There is typically a good turnout. “Last year we had about 630 people come and that was during a hurricane. So we’re hoping that the weather will be nicer this year and that we’ll see even more people,” Marinoff-Silk said.
The New Hampshire Astronomical Society will be setting up telescopes, for those who want to look up at the sky. If you’d rather keep your gaze earth-bound, you can look at bugs: the Caterpillar Lab from Marlborough will be bringing some of their caterpillars.
“So we just have a bunch of different organizations doing all kinds of science coming,” Marinoff-Silk said. The Caterpillar Lab aims “to raise awareness about the animals you can find in your local ecosystem, particularly caterpillars, and how important they are to our local ecosystems,” she said.
An activity called Mad Science will introduce children to the principles of air and pressure as they watch a hovercraft in action, according to the event page.
A special guest yet to be announced will be in attendance as well. “That guest speaker will also present the winners of the Alex Higgins Memorial Space Camp Scholarship,” Marinoff-Silk said. The scholarship was founded in 2000 in Memory of Alex Higgins of Bedford. Since 2001 it has helped more than than 50 New Hampshire children and teens attend the U.S. Space Camp & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for a week of simulated astronaut or pilot training, according to the website.
The planetarium will also be in full use, with a premiere of a new planetarium show. For that, you need tickets, which are free and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Show times will be at 11 a.m., noon, 2 p.m., and 3 p.m. The show, We Are Guardians, looks at how the world, its people and its ecosystems are connected and how satellite monitoring helps us see the effects of human activities and climate change, according to Marinoff-Silk

AerospaceFest
When: Saturday, Sept. 21, 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Where: McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, 2 Institute Drive, Concord
Tickets: Free, suggested donation $5-$10
Info: starhop.com

Last chance

Three area shows before Senie Hunt returns to Nashville

By Michael Witthaus
[email protected]

Since moving from Concord to Nashville a few years ago, Senie Hunt has found a lot of opportunities to grow as an artist. What was hard in New England, like driving two hours to pitch his percussive guitar skills to a new venue, is a lot more manageable in Music City.

“In Nashville, you walk down the street and find a place, and if they don’t get back to you, it’s just another walk down the road to go back and try it again,” he said by phone recently. “Trying to stay consistently active, but also trying to find gigs that I want to be doing more, is … easier.”

It’s also a hub to other Southern cities; Hunt has played in New Orleans and in Tennessee cities like Gatlinburg, Knoxville, Murfreesboro and Pigeon Forge, home to Dollywood. He still makes time to return home to play, and when he does it’s often to do a special show. That’s the case with a few upcoming gigs, his last in New England until next spring.

The biggest is a triple bill on Sept. 20 at Rockingham Ballroom in Newmarket. Hunt will perform backed by Amorphous Band, a venerable Seacoast group, with fiddler EJ Ouellette joining in. He has a full band, the electric Senie Hunt Project; it played last June at Concord’s Bank of NH Stage. But this will be the first time he’ll be backed by a band while playing his acoustic guitar and djembe.

“I’m really excited about that,” he said. “Normally if I do an acoustic song with my band, I have them step off and they come back for the electric set.”

However, those looking for a taste of Hunt’s blues rock material can see a trio version of his Project on Thursday, Sept. 19, at Penuche’s Ale House in Concord. Finally, Hunt will play an afternoon solo set at the Concord Multicultural Festival on Sept. 22 in Keach Park.

It’s a regular annual event for Hunt, who built his current schedule around it. When the festival debuted a few years ago, Hunt came away impressed. This year’s lineup includes Nepalese dancers Barranquilla Flavor, Suri Wang performing traditional Chinese music, Irish step dancers, Ruby Shabazz’s old-school soul and R&B, Bollywood from Varnika, and hip-hop and Afropop from Martin Toe, as well as Israeli dancing and Japanese Taiko drumming.

“It really opened my eyes up to how much diversity is in Concord that’s just kind of tucked away,” Hunt said. “Just to know that there’s so much diversity and culture around in their home neighborhood, bringing out the music and food and dancing all in a public space really gives anybody the opportunity to come up and really see for themselves how vibrant the community can be.”

Hunt will wrap up with shows in Rhode Island and Newburyport, Mass., before heading back to his new home. While here, he’s also adding guitar and vocals to “Harmony,” a song by his longtime friend Hank Osborne, at Rocking Horse Studio in Pittsfield.

“I’ve worked with Hank since pretty much Day 1 when I moved to Concord,” Hunt said. “When I heard Hank’s music, there were so many similarities between his and my style of playing. I’m a little rougher on my guitar than him, but he’s one of the few musicians in the town that plays a similar style.”

Then it’s back to Nashville, where Hunt’s original music is getting much-deserved attention.

“I get to play my own style, my own thing,” he said. “That’s something I didn’t know I would find while I was down here, because you go downtown and it’s all covers. But there are certain places that are a lot more open, not the country or rock scene, and they want to hear your own original stuff. I’ve been pretty well off with being able to find enough places that are interested in that … it’s keeping me active, that’s a big upside. I’m able to play the music I want to play.”

World Music for Peace – The Meter Maids, Amorphous Band w/ Senie Hunt & EJ Ouellette, and Big Blue World
When: Friday, Sept. 20, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Rockingham Ballroom, 22 Ash Swamp Road, Newmarket
Tickets: $20 at coastalsoundsnh.com (21+)

Senie Hunt Trio appears Thursday, Sept. 19, at 9 p.m. at Penuche’s Ale House in Concord, and Senie Hunt plays solo at the Concord Multicultural Festival in Keach Park on Sunday, Sept. 22, at 3 p.m.

Featured photo: Senie Hunt.Courtesy photo.Photo by Christine Torrey (Birch & Fern Photography)

The Music Roundup 24/09/19

Local music news & events

S• Helping hands: A local woman’s battle against breast cancer is the impetus for a benefit that has Frank Viele playing solo acoustic atop the bill, with Lisa Guyer kicking things off. Viele, a past NEMA Performer of the Year, has an album in progress that he’s been slowly releasing over the year. Its latest single, “Necessary Evil,” is a solid hybrid of classic rock and modern country. Thursday, Sept. 19, 5 p.m., Auburn Pitts, 167 Rockingham Road, Auburn, $25 at eventbrite.com.

• Willie big: The upcoming Outlaw Music Festival is a solid slice of Americana, with John Mellencamp and breakout twang hero Charley Crockett each playing 90-minute sets as a prelude to national treasure Willie Nelson & Family taking the stage. Recent reviews of the tour note that Mellencamp is playing a lot of his big hits like “Jack & Diane” and “Hurts So Good.” Friday, Sept. 20, 5 p.m., BankNH Pavilion, 61 Meadowbrook Lane, Gilford, $89 and up at livenation.com.

• Rock revival: For those too young to remember The Who at Woodstock, there’s The Sixties Show, a multimedia tribute to music’s (arguably) greatest decade. The setlist ranges from The Monkees’ “Pleasant Valley Sunday” to selections from the rock opera Tommy, with a couple of songs from left field like “Wichita Lineman,” a classic written by Jimmy Webb for Glen Campbell. Saturday, Sept. 21, 8 p.m., Nashua Center for the Arts, 22 Main St., Nashua, $39 and up at etix.com.

• L.A. farewell: The remarkable, nearly five-decade career of X ends next year with a Little Steven’s Underground Garage cruise, but not before they barnstorm the country one final time. They also made a final album, Smoke & Fiction, with the single “Big Black X” providing a look back at how the Los Angeles band’s lives have changed since they — and punk rock — broke out in 1977. Sunday, Sept. 22, 7 p.m., Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry, $45 and up at tupelomusichall.com.

• Horror show: The outsized sideburns sported by Cancerslug front man Alex Story are one reason he’s called Werewolf by fans, while another is the band’s Misfits-inspired horror punk, though Story cites influences going back to HP Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe. It’s provocative music — “If I’ve done my job right,” he says, at least one thing he offers “will anger, annoy or offend.” Tuesday, Sept. 24, 7 p.m., Jewel Music Venue, 61 Canal St., Manchester, $15.75 at eventbrite.com.

At the Sofaplex 24/09/19

Going Varsity in Mariachi (PG)

The mariachi band of Edinburg North High School in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas struggles in the 2021-2022 school year to continue the school’s legacy of high-scoring teams at mariachi competitions in this thoroughly charming documentary. In the tradition of great sports stories, the team here is facing some challenges. This is the first fully in-person school year since Covid with all the everything that came with that, the team has a lot of younger or less experienced members and even longtime coach Abel Acuña is struggling with burnout. We get the story of individual kids — the hyper competent Bella, Abby who dreams of a future teaching mariachi, Drake who is sort of figuring himself out but finds that mariachi deeply matters to him. But we also get a wider story of how and why mariachi has become such an important part of the south Texas high school experience. This is a charming, absolutely winning doc. AStreaming on Netflix

Daughters (PG-13)

It’s hard not to start redesigning the American carceral in your head while watching Daughters, a documentary recently added to Netflix. The focus of the story, though, is not The System but a small group of girls, who range in age from just about elementary school through teens, and their incarcerated dads. Born from a program aimed at building up Black girls’ confidence, the Date With Dad program requires the dads to attend 10 weeks of classes before an in-prison dance with their daughters. For a few hours, the dads, dressed in suits, get to hug, dance with and talk to their daughters in person — often the first time that’s happened in years due to limited in-person visits.

The process of working up to the event seems to give the dads new perspectives on their roles in their children’s lives; the dance itself seems to emotionally devastate everybody, driving home to the men how important it is for their children that they get home and stay home. Title cards explain that 95 percent of the men who have participated in the program over the past 12 years and been released have not returned to prison. You can feel the ripples into the past (the men discuss and consider their relationships with their fathers) and into the future, as these smart, capable young girls struggle with their fathers’ absences. The star of the doc is Aubrey, a very bright, very ambitious girl when we meet her at 5 years old who is trying to stay connected to her father. It’s a sweet gut-punch of a movie. A Streaming on Netflix.

Uglies (PG-13)

Joey King, who is, we’re told, a real uggo in a shiny future dystopia, eagerly awaits the plastic surgery that every 16-year-old in her post-climate-apocalypse society receives in this movie based on a YA book by Scott Westerfield. I realize that “people in their natural state aren’t ugly” is part of this movie’s whole deal but it’s hard to take seriously the idea that this cast of “teenagers” (i.e. twentysomethings with perfect skin) who would look at home in high-end perfume ads are awkward normies in need of improvement. Nevertheless, that physical perfection will lead to perfect civic harmony is what their society, which is maybe run by a scientist played by Laverne Cox (who is at least having some fun here), has taught these kids. So Tally (King) is psyched to join her friend Peris (Chase Stokes) in the city where the newly prettified people go for a life of neverending parties. But then she meets fellow “uglie” Shay (Brianne Tju) and learns about the Smoke — a wilderness settlement of unsurgeried “regular people” led by David (Keith Powers), a revolutionary hottie.

Uglies feels like a copy of a copy of teen dystopia stories like the Divergent and Delirium book series. I feel like there was a way that this movie, with its beautiful movie stars made “regular” mostly with bad wigs, could have had some fun. But it’s too by the numbers and too focused on delivering unnecessary world-building exposition that ultimately doesn’t help the whole thing make sense. C Available on Netflix.

Rebel Ridge (TV-MA)

Giving Jack Reacher vibes, Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) is an ex-Marine who travels light and finds himself in a fight with the police department of a small Louisiana town after two cops knock him off his bicycle and take the $36K in cash he was carrying in part to bail his cousin out of jail. Aggressive asset seizure and high bails for minor crimes are part of the townwide corruption scheme led by police chief Sandy Burne (Don Johnson) but Terry isn’t initially super concerned with this; he’s just trying to keep his cousin from ending up in the same jail as the men his cousin testified against a few years earlier. But of course, the police don’t realize they’re up against a man with a particular set of skills, and Terry — with help from courthouse clerk/future lawyer Summer (AnnaSophia Robb) — is soon putting his military training in violent if non-lethal problem solving to use.

Unlike Reacher, Rebel Ridge is a bummer. It’s a depressing slog through racism and corruption where even the “good people” are more or less powerless to do anything — though exactly why they’re powerless doesn’t entirely make sense. The movie isn’t smart enough to truly examine the serious issues it’s dealing with nor is it enough fun to make you want to excuse it. And it’s way too long. C Available on Netflix .

Greedy People (R)

Will (Himesh Patel) and Terry (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), newly partnered police officers in a South Carolina island town, cover up one accidental death with a conspiracy that racks up a body count and threatens to set them against each other. Will and his pregnant wife, Paige (Lily James), are new to town. On his first day of work, Will’s attempt to follow up on a police call ends with the death of Virginia Chelto (Traci Lords), wife of Wallace Chelto (Tim Blake Nelson), the town’s wealthiest man. For reasons that don’t entirely hold up, Will and Terry decide that the only way out of this situation is to stage a robbery — which includes taking the many stacks of cash they find in the house. The scheme snowballs and pulls in Chelto’s secretary/mistress Deborah (Nina Arianda), a sketchy masseuse (Simon Rex), his mom (Neva Howell) and men known as The Irishman (Jim Gaffigan) and The Colombian (José María Yazpik). Only Will and Terry’s supervising officer (Uzo Aduba), who is herself going through it, seems to suspect something bigger is going on.

Greedy People never quite gets the mix of “dark” to “comedy” right in this dark comedy — is it a thriller with a few notes of silliness or a comedy with some sinister moments? The movie doesn’t decide and as a result the solid cast doesn’t always feel well-used. C+ Available for rent or purchase.

Trap (PG-13)

M. Night Shyamalan wrote and directed this reverse-heist-type thriller that is goofier than it realizes but more fun than its one-trick trailer makes you think it will be. Josh Hartnett plays Cooper, the Dad-est Dad to ever use slang wrong and ask about daughter Riley’s (Ariel Donoghue) rocky relationship with some former friends. They are attending a Taylor-Swift-ish girlie’s pop concert — Lady Raven, played by Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka Shyamalan — where Cooper notices an extremely heavy police presence. He chats up a merch vendor and learns that it’s all in service of catching vicious serial killer The Butcher, whom they believe will be at the concert. And they are right because Cooper is The Butcher (spoiler but not really; the trailer gives it away). Without tipping his hand to the unknowing Riley, Cooper MacGyvers his way through the concert to try to find out what security measures are in place and what they know about him — very little, in terms of his appearance, but a lot about his psychology thanks to a profiler played by Hayley freaking Parent Trap Mills, which is quite awesome.

Trap does not stand up to even a little bit of thought about the “but why”s of it all, but it has moments of dark fun and Hartnett is clearly having a good time juggling Mr. Happy Normal Guy with unhinged psychopath. B- Available for rent or purchase.

Longlegs (R)

FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) helps to track a serial killer who she seems to have some sort of connection to in this vibesy horror movie. Actually, Longlegs (Nicolas Cage), as the possible killer calls himself in coded letters to the police, doesn’t personally himself kill anybody. But little notes found at crime scenes have FBI agents Carter (Blair Underwood) and Browning (Michelle Choi-Lee) pretty certain he is somehow involved in what otherwise appear to be family annihilation murder-suicides. Harker is brought into the investigation when she shows herself to have, er, good hunches? Her abilities are rated by the FBI as something more than an educated guess if not quite psychic-ness. After viewing all the case files, she heads home to work on decoding Longlegs’ letters — a task made easier when he apparently breaks into her home and leaves a sort of rosetta stone to his code. I think one of his notes is just “down low, too slow” which is funny but also stupid and what’s the point of the code again?

Look, there are few things as ham-on-cheese-on-yet-more-ham than Nicolas Cage, made up to look like some kind of Norma Desmond-meets-Willy-Wonka nightmare, whisper sing-song-voice saying “hail, Satan,” but all of that seems to be happening in a separate movie from the grim, gray investigation plus childhood trauma movie that the rest of the cast is in. Monroe in particular is so grim and affectless that I found myself having a hard time paying attention to her character. This movie hits for me about half the time and even then it’s a see-saw between “old-fashioned investigative tactics” and “evil dolls,” “profiling the method of the killer” and “the actual Devil.” C+ Available for rent or purchase.

The Deliverance (R)

Lee Daniels directs this horror movie where we start off thinking the big evil might be generational traumas and the systematic stresses of poverty but nope, it’s a literal demon. Ebony (Andra Day) has moved her three children into a house with her mother, Alberta (Glenn Close, chewing it up), so Ebony can help Alberta with her cancer treatments and Alberta can help Ebony with her kids. Everybody’s doing a terrible job — Ebony is a caring mother but also verbally and physically abusive with her kids and can’t let go of the hurt Alberta caused by being that way with her (among other childhood traumas). Social worker Cynthia (Mo’Nique) is pretty sure it’s time to remove Ebony’s kids from her home — and that’s before they start acting super weird and the youngest son shows signs of possession. And then Bernice James (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), who had been skulking around the home, shows up to tell Ebony that her house is also home to some kind of ancient evil and maybe Bernice can help her with a “deliverance” — a Pepsi to the Coca-Cola of exorcism, I guess.

The often “is this problematic?” first chunk of the movie with its focus on societal ills really takes a hard left turn into “Demons!” in a way that the movie does not know how to smooth together or connect with anything but the most obvious “this is a metaphor” duct tape. I appreciate what it’s attempting to do but The Deliverance doesn’t make all of its ideas work in a way that feels coherent. Glenn Close’s character, for instance, really makes the most of her high gothic Hillbilly Elegy-with-extra-cheese performance but it often feels like it’s happening in another movie. C Available on Netflix.

Immaculate (R)

American nun Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney) finds herself “immaculately” pregnant in this movie where you could probably edit in scenes from The First Omen and I wouldn’t notice. When Cecilia comes to the secluded nun retirement nursing home in Italy, she barely knows the language and is just that day taking her religious orders. She has a roomie with an older sister vibe, Sister Gwen (Benedetta Porcaroli), who smokes and is maybe the first person to suggest that they bail on this sketchy place when odd things start to happen (such as, for example, the pregnancy).

Sweeney is perfectly good at walking the line between being a wide-eyed innocent and being not so wide-eyed that she can’t still pull off some of the Final Girl action. The overall plot and the movie’s ultimate villain are all bonkers — so much so that I wished we got more of that bonkers, bigger and earlier, and spent less time walking around ye olde Italian convent with the spookiness just out of view. C+ Available for rent or purchase and streaming on Hulu.

The Union (PG-13)

Halle Berry is Roxanne Hall, a spy for a blue-collar spy organization called The Union — they aren’t Yale know-it-alls, boss Tom Brennan (J.K. Simmons) explains, they’re people who come from backgrounds where they know how to get things done on time and under budget. When all U.S. agents, law enforcement and military have their identities burned, Roxanne needs help getting back the hard drive with that info before it gets into the wrong hands (just don’t ask questions about all of this). The first trustworthy person who comes to mind? Mike McKenna (Mark Wahlberg), her high school boyfriend who still lives in their New Jersey hometown and now works construction, welding stuff and working on beams high in the air — which becomes one of his particular skills when he is recruited/kidnapped into working for The Union.

The cast here is fine — we also get Jackie Earl Haley, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Evil’s Mike Colter — and the movie is on paper the correct blend of dumb and action. But there is also a flatness, like the movie wasn’t entirely sure what to do after it came up with its concept and anchored its stars. Meanwhile, those stars, Wahlberg and Berry, have a good buddy relationship, one perhaps best portrayed in what I’m pretty sure, based on the “Rock ‘N Jock B-Ball Jam” shirt Wahlberg is wearing, are real photos of the two in the 1990s, when various internet stories say they met. I wish the movie — with some smarter writing, and a Berry-Wahlberg mix that was a little heavier on the Berry — could have found something better to do with it. C Streaming on Netflix.

Young Woman and the Sea (PG)

A mild but solid movie, Young Woman and the Sea is tailor-made for post-Olympics-summer viewing, specifically to be watched with a young athlete/athletics-appreciating kid. Based on the real life of swimmer Trudy Ederle, it shows progressive-for-early-20th-century mom Gertrude Ederle (Jeanette Hain) insist that her young daughters Trudy (Daisy Ridley as an adult) and Meg (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) learn how to swim, even though swimming isn’t good for girls and our delicate girl bodies or something. Her stubborn husband Henry (Kim Bodnia) initially refuses to give her the money for their lessons. Gertrude makes her own money and pays for their lessons at the girls-only pool next to a boiler room, and eventually Trudy and Meg both learn to swim, with Meg becoming such a strong swimmer that she starts to win competitions. Trudy proves herself to be even better and finds herself on the Olympic team for the 1924 Paris Olympics — though in a pre-Title IX world the female athletes had terrible accommodations and no ability to train on the long sea voyage to France. After underwhelming at the Olympics and facing the prospect of arranged marriage to some employee of her father’s at the family butcher shop, Trudy decides to attempt another challenge: swimming across the English channel.

This is fairly standard sports movie stuff — thrill of victory, agony of defeat, women can do sports — but it’s made from quality material and it makes for a good low-effort, family-friendly watch. B- Available on Disney+.

The Instigators (R)

Matt Damon and Casey Affleck are two thieves who participate in a poorly planned heist in this sparkless Apple TV+ movie.

Rory (Damon) and Cobby (Affleck) are part of a crew led by Scalvo (Jack Harlow), an idiot. Besegai (Michael Stuhlbarg), a person who clearly hasn’t considered the uncertain nature of electoral politics, has hired them — at the behest of yet another layer of criminals — to rob the certain-to-be-stuffed-with-graft-money safe of the reelected mayor of Boston (Ron Perlman). Every detail about the heist, from the route into the hotel to the number of civilians they’re likely to encounter, has been meticulously planned, they’re told. But, of course every one of those details is pretty much wrong and the plan quickly goes off the rails. Rory and Cobby are soon on the run from a massive amount of law-enforcement as well as a fixer (Ving Rhames) looking to steal back something more precious than money.

The Instigators has some good ideas and a good cast (which includes Hong Chau as Damon’s character’s therapist) and plenty of fun with the Boston of it all, but like many an Apple property, it feels inert. You can see where the money has been spent and what the plan is, but all the quality ingredients fail to come together to create a tasty dish. C+ Streaming on Apple TV+.

Jackpot! (R)

The premise of Amazon Prime Video’s Jackpot! is darkly cute and makes more sense to me than, say, all of the Purge movies ever did: After a mid-2020s great depression, California creates a grand lottery. When a winner is picked, that person’s name is broadcast across the state, and if you can find and murder that person in a 12-hour period after their win you get the money. If they make it through alive they get the money. Murder of that one person is legal but guns are off limits.

When Katie (Awkwafina) accidentally plays and wins the lottery, she finds herself having to use her stage-fighting skills to fight off all the Los Angeles denizens looking to kill her and take her ticket. She agrees to let Noel (John Cena), a sort of professional lotto-winner bodyguard, help keep her safe in exchange for a percentage of her billion-dollar win.

The premise is fine and Awkwafina and Cena have nice buddy chemistry but the movie doesn’t go as big or as silly as it needed to to make this the R-rated action comedy it was clearly trying to be. C+ Amazon Prime Video

Burn, by Peter Heller

Burn,by Peter Heller (Knopf, 291 pages)

Jess and Storey have been friends since they were kids growing up in a small town in southern Vermont. As adults, they maintained their friendship, in part by spending several weeks each year hunting off the grid. In fact, it was those trips that killed Jess’s marriage. His wife wasn’t happy with his lengthy absences to hunt and fish when he couldn’t make time to vacation with her.

Jess is still mourning the loss of his wife and dog, and clutching the prayer stone that Jan had once given him, when he joins Storey to hunt in north-central Maine one September. But his personal tragedy soon shrinks in the middle of a bigger one.

When the men try to return to civilization after more than a week off the grid, they find that civilization, as they know it, has vanished — the bridge they’d previously crossed blown up, no cell service, towns incinerated, the residents missing except for a few corpses.The second Civil War, it seems, has come to New England.

Burn is novelist Peter Heller’s take on a popular theme: the idea that America’s polarization could lead to secession and war, trivialized by some with the euphemism “national divorce.” There have been numerous fiction and nonfiction books exploring this theme, and a movie earlier this year.

But Burn is no made-for-Hollywood thriller that exploits the country’s tensions. It aims higher with a story that explores family, betrayal, secrets and friendship. The savage conflict is just an accelerant that elevates the stakes.

The story begins with Jess and Storey emerging from the woods to find a gory mystery: Where are the people who lived in the incinerated towns? Why were their cars torched, while boats at the marina were left untouched? And most pressing of all, who was responsible? The federal government, or militias, or a foreign invader? “Jess began to carry a stone in his gut he recognized as dread,” Heller writes.

The men, both in their late thirties, surmised that the violence was related to “secession mania” that had pitted Mainers against each other. “But no one had expected it to come to full-bore civil strife. They had discussed the risk while planning the trip and decided that what was happening in Maine was no worse than the stirrings of revolt in Idaho and the failed secession vote in Texas the year before. These were fringe minorities, vocal and passionate, but not a real threat.”

Storey — who lives in Burlington, Vermont, with his wife and two daughters — and Jess, who lives in Colorado — have no dog in this fight. But they also have no way to get out, once they realize that all the combatants seem to be shooting everyone they see on sight. Their primary problem is sheer survival as they try to figure out how to escape what seems to have become a war zone.

They scavenge food and coffee from boats, and camp deep in the woods, as they plot a way out. Storey grows increasingly worried about his family, while Jess ruminates on what he has already lost, and his teenage years, providing flashbacks into his pre-apocalypse life, in which he spent most of his time with Storey’s idyllic, warm family, feeling unloved by his own parents, who mostly seemed to care about books.

There is little time for contemplation, however, as the men have to keep moving. The danger they are in is underscored when helicopters appear without warning, firing on someone in a boat, and at one point the two friends have to fire on other men who are shooting at them; while both are experienced hunters, neither has ever shot at another human being, let alone killed one. And by means of a ham radio they come across, they are able to learn snippets of what is transpiring around them, from a Canadian broadcast in French.

All of this provides tension enough to sustain a whole book, but Heller surprises his readers with two turns of events — one in the present day, one in the past — that raise the stakes even beyond the hellscape they are navigating. The introduction of these subplots adds complexity to the men’s journey, and at one point threatens their friendship.

Full disclosure: I was already a Heller fan, having read 2012’s The Dog Stars, 2014’s The Painter and 2023’s The Last Rangers (and given each of them an A). But not every author gets better with age, and with the subject matter, I was prepared for Burn to disappoint. It did not.

An accomplished outdoorsman who grew up in New York, went to high school in Vermont and attended Dartmouth College, Heller’s writing is suffused with knowledge of nature and sport, and New England. In Burn, he uses the names of real towns, not fictional ones, which might be disconcerting to lovers of Maine, as the conflict widens. But it’s also interesting to see this sort of story, which a more predictable writer might have set in a southern state, play out where it does.

The problem with a book like Burn is that the reader is anxious to get to the end to find out what happens to the characters, but at the same time doesn’t want their story to end. Heller has not written sequels before, but Burn is deserving of one. While he delivers as satisfying an ending as possible in a story this bleak, we still want to know what happens next.

“Always leave them wanting more” is a phrase attributed to P.T. Barnum. Heller employs the tactic well. Still, I’d pay $50 cash right now for Burn 2. A

—Jennifer Graham

Album Reviews 24/09/19

The Black Pacific, Here Comes Our Wave (Dine Alone Records)

The long-awaited second album from this side project led by Jim Lindberg (lead singer and songwriter for seminal California skate-punk band Pennywise) is a lot of fun at the beginning, leading off with “I Think I’m Paranoid,” which Lindberg accurately describes as a “panic attack with distorted guitars at 120 beats per minute.” If you’re a visiting Martian, that means it’s legitimately hardcore-fast, but this isn’t just a sk8er record; after a few barn-burners like “No Fun” (about “sociopath dictators around the world inflicting chaos and death on innocent civilians”), and take-no-prisoners rawker “Here We Come” (about the encroaching threat of AI taking everyone’s jobs and all that happy stuff), along comes “Float Away,” which opens as an exquisitely filthy no-wave thing and becomes a Hoobastank-derived emo joint in which he yearns to build a raft and sail away with his wife. This one puts Lindberg’s versatility with different power-rock styles on brilliant display. A+— Eric W. Saeger

Blitz Vega, Northern Gentlemen (FutureSonic Records)

This debut LP is also a posthumous one; as the duo’s remaining member Kav Sandhu has remarked, Smiths bassist Andy Rourke (who died last year of pancreatic cancer) was this band. Where it’ll go from here is anyone’s guess, but it’d be nice to see Sandhu continue in this vein, especially if you’re into ’80s music; there’s some really captivating material here. The album opens with “Disconnected,” which flirts with a Depeche Mode feel while also drawing from Lords Of The New Church. That’s followed by government-issue mid-tempo rocker “Strong Forever,” a junkie-rock dance-along made for post-industrial smoke-filled rooms. “Big Nose” hails to New York Dolls deconstructionism; the jangly “High Gravity” recalls mid-career Wire; “Love City” will make you think of ’70s/’80s-era Jim Steinman (remember, he didn’t just produce Meatloaf but Sisters of Mercy as well). With any luck this project will continue, but the loss of Rourke may well negate any hope of that, which really is a shame. A — Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yuppitty-yup, it’s all downhill from here, the new albums of Sept. 20 are on the trucks and heading to the stores for another freaky Friday of new music, as the snows gather in Canada and our tundra prepares to permafrost! Yes, what I actually mean is that you’ve already heard all about those albums from bootleggers and people who found the one YouTubeToMP3 website that wasn’t crawling with viruses and gleefully downloaded the albums, and you’ve already heard the advice that I’m about to impart, but can you at least pretend that this is news to you, that’d be great. But first, let’s look at the new solo album from Sonic Youth bandleader Thurston Moore, titled Flow Critical Lucidity, that is if he can give us a rest from promoting that Shelly Duvall lookalike girl on his Instagram, what’s even going on there, no don’t tell me I don’t care. Huh, today I learned that Moore and his bandmate/ex-wife Kim Gordon released a collaborative album with Yoko Ono in 2012, which came out at about the same time as my favorite New Yawk City public relations dude started sending me all sorts of spam about a new Yoko Ono album; maybe that collaboration had something to do with people trying to legitimize Yoko and make me write about her, which I did at the time in these very pages unless it was somewhere else (I hated it). No, everything Moore does is considered rad and cool by people who enjoy not-very-good music, but if that is your wont, yes, I shall now sashay over to the YouTube whatsis and have a listen to “Sans Limites,” Moore’s new single, which features guest vocalist/weird French person Laeitia Sadier, of Stereolab! OK, I’m reporting live from the YouTubes, and this song has been shockingly boring for a full minute, a guitar-strummy thing that sounds like your little brother trying to impress his crush, like, sort of a fractal but nothing fascinating going on. Finally Moore starts singing in his serious-mode Nick Cave voice, and the only thing Sadler is doing is breathing sort of melodically. What. Ever.

• Since 2000, Canadian singing lady Nelly Furtado has straddled the lines between pop diva, Latinx pop star and trip-hop princess, aside from her short stint singing that borderline heavy metal song with Bryan Adams at the Olympics, when they gave everyone in the crowd drum-shaped noisemakers, do you even remember that? Well heaven only knows what she’s doing on her seventh album, titled, of course, 7, because she claims that her ADHD drove her to write 500 songs since her last album, 2017’s The Ride, let me go listen to one of them now. Yes, “Corazón” is the opening tune, a tribal-washed reggaeton affair with a deep-diva tonality, it’s pretty interesting.

• Reality talent-show fixture Katy Perry is back with us again, with a new album called 143! She told cardboard-cutout jokeman Jimmy Kimmel that the album is “super high energy, it’s super summer, it’s very high BPM,” which would make sense if it were still summer, but as we know, it is not. Regardless, the lead single from this record, “Woman’s World,” is actually low-BMP, not that I’m trying to be pedantic, and it’s easily the most uninspired thing I’ve ever heard from her, like she hired a hack songwriter who needed immediate money to pay his gardener. Very low-quality stuff, folks.

• Lastly it’s Conor Oberst and his band Bright Eyes, with a new LP titled Five Dice All Threes! The album’s jump-off track, “Rainbow Overpass,” combines snoozy Bonnaroo-ready indie-folk with loud Big Black-style no-wave. Nice idea, but, you know — why? — Eric W. Saeger

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