The Bright Lands by John Fram

Available July 7, 2020

Buckle up! This is a wild one!

When Joel Whitley’s younger brother leaves him a cryptic text message, he knows it’s time to return home. The hometown that drove him away with it’s bigotry and small mindedness. Bentley, Texas loves it’s football and it’s players are town royalty. Bentley also loves it’s secrets. When Joel’s brother goes missing, he knows there is more going on than his brother running away. Trying to find an ally in Bentley is a complication that Joel doesn’t know if he can handle. Friends from his past have to reckon with their own tragic memories of a similar disappearance and the police seem oddly uninterested in taking any clues seriously. As Joel comes closer to understanding what happened to his brother, a dark and deadly force threatens to tear apart the entire community.  

The Bright Lands is full of twists and turns and small town secrets. It’s a chilling look at the effects of hero worship and allowing young men to get away with horrific behavior solely because their athletic ability provides others with joy. Full of complicated characters, The Bright Lands shows us what happens when everyone has a secret to protect and the lengths they’ll go to protect themselves. 

This has been described as Friday Night Lights meets Supernatural, and while I don’t think it’s quite like that, it’s close. There is a truly dark and threatening force at work in the novel but it’s hard to compare the bigger threat-a supernatural force or unrestrained bigotry and homophobia. Both drive people to shun and kill people for no reason other than to spread hate. How much influence that dark force had over the actions of the characters will be up to you to decide. John Fram crafted a tightly woven tale where every character is important to the overall story. Everyone’s actions will either lead you to the finish or throw you off course. There are just so many, many secrets and each one unravels to create a more complex story. It’s wild, but incredibly entertaining. 

There is a real focus on Joel’s feelings towards his family and the responsibility he feels towards his brother Dylan. We find out pretty early on that Joel was pretty much run out of town and goes to be successful in college and start a high paying and high power career. He basically thumbs his nose at everyone as he parties, does drugs, and spends oodles of money. Throughout this ten years, he doesn’t really every come home or call, or plain have a relationship with his brother so when he receives that cryptic text, he realizes he needs to be a better brother. Unfortunately for book reasons, that doing better looks much different than he planned on. The author really dives into Joel’s feeling of responsibility, even though Joel is his brother, not his parent. I found it a really interesting look at personal responsibility and how that responsibility can go both ways. Joel left town for his own physical and emotional safety and he deserves a happy life and was always under the assumption that Dylan has parents to care for him. That can be true while also stating that he could have picked up the phone a bit more often.

Also, I have mixed feelings about the big reveal of the Bright Lands. It felt really over the top and I hate reading about attacks on children so a lot of it was pretty hard to read. That said, it explains so much of the town’s behavior towards the football team, the high ranking town officials and community members, and also, the overall sense that no one ever says what they actually mean in this town. I wish it had been a small college town? Couldn’t everyone be a little older? But the ages of the kids is important for other reasons so it’s all complicated. It’s just complicated.

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Thank you to Netgalley and the Publisher for the opportunity to read and review this title. All opinions and mistakes are my own. This post contains affiliate links.  I earn from qualifying purchases.