"All of this made me feel better about myself, and I was grateful to the books for teaching me—without my even having to read them—that there are people in the world more desperate, more self-absorbed, more boring than I was."
—page 88, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England by Brooke Clarke
Sam Pulsifer is a convicted felon. He "accidentally" burned down the Emily Dickinson House in his hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts as a teenager. The prosecution considered his act deliberate. Sam blames his mom for telling him all kinds of stories centered in the Emily Dickinson House. It is alluded that mom blames her husband because she started telling the stories when he left the family for three years, before returning to his wife and son.
Now, ten years after Sam's release from serving ten years in prison, and after he has constructed a new life with a wife, two children, a job as a packaging specialist with Pioneer Packaging, and a home in the Camelot housing development, Thomas Coleman has shown up on his doorstep. Thomas's parents were in the Emily Dickinson House as it burned. He expects an apology from Sam—which he gets—but is unsatisfied with Sam's sincerity. That is because Sam states that he is truly sorry, but he seems to be lacking many social graces. He longs to be "normal," although he cannot quite grasp what that means, due to his distance from "normalcy."
So, Thomas tells a story that "destroys" the new life that Sam has built.
The story is intriguing because Sam—more properly, author Brooke Clarke, and, therefore, Sam—is questioning the nature of story and narrative. What direct effect can a story, does a story, have on the world? What if that world has no soul—a life that feels hollow in a community that feels shallow with its seemingly happy families and cookie-cutter Camelot housing developments with cookie-cutter houses and superstore Book Warehouses? I hope to soon discover Sam's (and Brooke's) answer to these questions.
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