55 pages • 1 hour read
Jess LoureyUnspeakable Things
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: Child Abductions in 1980s Minnesota
Content Warning: This novel refers to emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, as well as child neglect, murder, violence, racism, and anti-gay bias.
According to her blog, Lourey came of age in the 1980s in Paynesville, Minnesota. Eight boys near Paynesville were abducted, and Lourey grew up believing it was normal for kids to have a curfew and fear the possibility of nearby child abduction. In 1989, 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling’s disappearance, which took place 30 miles from Paynesville, changed American parents’ perceptions of children’s safety.
Nine months before Jacob’s disappearance, a boy named Jared was kidnapped and sexually assaulted by a man with a gun. In 2010, a local blogger began investigating the connection between Jacob’s disappearance, Jared’s kidnapping, and the kidnapping of the Paynesville boys. She realized that there were several points of overlap in the stories of the kidnapping victims and Jared’s recollection. Her work, as detailed on the In the Dark podcast, prompted a reopening of the investigation of Jacob’s unsolved disappearance. In 2015, authorities identified a person of interest and issued a warrant for the home of Danny James Heinrich. The discovery of child pornography led to his arrest. As part of his plea bargain, he led the FBI to the burial site of Jacob Wetterling.
Jacob’s disappearance prompted a national conversation about how much autonomy children should have and what it means to be “safe.” Lourey’s experience of coming of age in a small town was deeply informed by parental fears of strangers hurting children. Her somewhat autobiographical novel reckons with the effects of growing up in a fearful environment with frequent child abduction and assault.
Genre Context: Blending Mystery, Crime, and Historical Fiction
In addition to incorporating aspects of her own childhood into Unspeakable Things, Lourey experienced trauma that informs her depictions of violence, loss, and grief. In a 2016 Ted Talk, Lourey describes how writing her first novel helped her to process the trauma of her first husband committing suicide. While the crime genre attracts critiques about responsibility and the sensationalizing of real people’s traumas, the context of Jacob Wetterling’s story and Lourey’s similarities to Cass, the protagonist, lend credibility to the text, as Lourey lived through the time in which she writes.
Lourey employs several conventions of the bildungsroman, as she fictionalizes her own coming-of-age experiences. Lourey witnessed the transition of conceptions of childhood from a time of innocence and carefree enjoyment to a time of extreme vulnerability and danger to the average child.
Because the narrator is an adolescent girl, the text also employs conventions of young adult literature. Part of the text’s unreliable narration stems from child Cass’s narratorial limitations; for instance, sometimes she fails to adequately convey what she notices around her because she is distracted by something like Pac-Man. The novel also consciously employs elements of popular “girls’ mysteries” like Harriet the Spy and Nancy Drew, iconic representations of young female detectives whom Cass emulates. The text’s unreliable narration also lends itself to genre categorization as a psychological thriller, since Cass’s perspective is not known to be trustworthy or complete.
There are also elements of historical fiction, since the text was published in 2020 but takes place in the 1980s. Like many works of historical fiction, the novel engages in the interplay between retrospect and fictional commentary on then-current situations. The narratorial perspective of the 12-year-old as an adult and successful writer who is looking back on her youth lends itself to both introspection and retrospection. As in To Kill a Mockingbird, this perspective allows the narrator to both convey what she has learned as an adult—and how she applies this to the lessons of her youth—as well as offer ironic commentary about the situations in which 13-year-old Cass finds herself.
Fans of It, The Goonies, and Stranger Things will also recognize the genre resonances of media set in the 1980s, since the freedom of children to explore, discover, investigate, get into trouble, and encounter danger is an essential component of this text. While the aforementioned texts employ similar settings that allow young (predominantly male) characters to encounter danger and learn from their mistakes and brushes with monsters, Unspeakable Things shies away from this genre by using a female character’s attempt to investigate on her own as a cautionary tale. In this way, the novel subverts the conventions of the adventure genre; a child nearly dies because of her investigative drive, which is perhaps a more realistic ending to such an investigation.
