Emerging from the remote wilderness of northern Maine after two weeks of moose hunting, Jess and Storey are confounded by clues suggesting that something has gone terribly wrong. The bridges south have been destroyed and the first two towns they encounter heading north are both smoldering in ashes.
They have no access to the outside world, no cell bars, nothing but static from radio stations. Friends since boyhood, never missing any opportunity to get away on hunting or fishing excursions, Jess and Storey have always had each other's backs. But the uncertainty, the unknowability of the situation they find themselves in tests the bounds of their loyalty and peels away new layers in their friendship.
Heller paints vivid images of the two extremes Jess and Storey find themselves in. The beauty of Maine's forested hills and quaint villages is suddenly forgotten when unknown gunmen start firing at them from an abandoned building. They look out across a shimmering lake and fantasize about floating out there fishing for bass. They notice a small boat coming their way when a pair of Blackhawk helicopters breaks over the treetops obliterating the craft and whoever was in it.
After we're introduced to spats of violence and the constant danger of their situation, Burn becomes beautifully sentimental. Sentimental about nature's awe-inspiring beauty and reminiscent about the untold secrets of their friendship.
We see everything through Jess's eyes. "The sense that simple beauty might hold so much of what was needed, and that it was just as true as all the shadowy architectures of thought."
He calms himself remembering the times he was so awed by nature's beauty that he felt he might die from the feeling it, "Not perish, but simply cease at the apex of his own fullness."
Jess wonders if Storey knows the truth about his first lover, the older woman with slate gray eyes. He remembers the loneliness in those eyes, "They were steady, but where they had always held a game confidence, and a kind of music, as if she were singing to herself, how the shadows there seemed to extend to empty rooms and hallways where the song hf her life echoed."
With its promise of intense action, danger at every corner, brief battles for survival while they try to find a way out of Maine's sudden civil war, Burn surprises us, capturing the joy and deep pain of memories, the confusion of family and childhood and the heart of long, abiding friendships.
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