Five top books on the dark side of small towns

Stefan Kiesbye has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. His stories and poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and his first book, Next Door Lived a Girl, won the Low Fidelity Press Novella Award.

For the Wall Street Journal, Kiesbye named a list of five top books on the dark side of small towns, including:

The Murder Farm
by Andrea Maria Schenkel (2008)

This novel, based on a real-life crime, had Germany abuzz and marked the arrival of a powerful writer. Andrea Maria Schenkel's book is set in 1950s Bavaria; on a farm on the outskirts of the town of Tannöd, a family and its new maidservant are brutally killed. The old farmer and his wife were misers and much despised, but why were the children slaughtered? A journalist, who years earlier had spent a summer in the town, returns to discover that his fond memories of the place were deceptive. In the novel's personal accounts of the Danner family, chapters from within the killer's mind, and stories from within the close-knit community, a different picture emerges. As though the townspeople are preparing for a reckoning, narrative passages are interspersed with verses from the "Litany for the Comfort of Poor Souls," taken from a 1922 spiritual guide. Fragment by fragment, the reader pieces together what happened on the Murder Farm and who killed the Danners. Schenkel's writing is as harsh as the conditions under which her subjects lived. The prose can be choppy, even truncated, the style impersonal—all qualities that allow a reader to absorb the details of horrendous crimes.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue