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Writer Even Scares Himselfby Steve Mertl 'I tried to imagine the nastiest bloodiest thing that you could do to a child without killing that child or hurting that child physically. I was shocked at myself for having come up with that scene. My hands were shaking as I read that over.' In the opening of Stand in Hell, Dennis Bolen's second novel, a boy must hold his beloved dog still while his drunken father shoots her.
His aim is bad. The dog is only wounded. But the man stumbles out of the barn angrily, leaving the boy to put the cowering dog out of its misery. With a ballpeen hammer.
How do you reconcile the searing scene with the cheery open face beneath Bolen's unruly thatch of greying hair?
If he's not exorcising any personal demons, where did it come from?
From just across his desk.
Bolen is a Corrections canada parole officer specializing in violent offenders.
The remorseless cruelty of Stand in Hell, redeemed only in its final pages, has the ring of truth because it reflects the brutality of his client's lives.
"There's a lot of my observational elements in these characters that you see doing violent things," he says.
Stand in Hell is alcoholic teacher Robin Wallenco's search for an unspoken, poisonous truth at the heart of his family.
He suspects his grandfather took part in Nazi massacres during the Second World War but must make a strange pilgrimage to meet an invalid war criminal to be sure.
Separated in time, the journey of Wallenco's grandfather into the Nazi death machine is also chronicled.
Stand in Hell's Violence seems chance and predestined at the same time.
A young woman is raped with a pistol. She kills her tormentor but the facade she built to protect herself from memories of past abuse soon crumbles.
A man facing execution during the Holocaust is offered a chance to live if he becomes an executioner himself, eerily echoing the book's traumatic opening and resonating again at the end.
That defining scene, although fiction, reflects the tormented psyches Bolen has seen in his 18-year career.
"I tried to imagine the nastiest bloodiest thing that you could do to a child without killing that child or hurting that child physically," he says.
"I was shocked at myself for having come up with that scene. My hands were shaking as I read that over."
Bolen, 42, actually wrote Stand in Hell before his first published novel. Stupid Crimes had sold out its 1,500-copy 1992 printing by tiny Anvil Press, which he partly owns, and was reissued by Vintage Press last year in a press run twice as large.
Stupid crimes, a black comedy with parole officer Barry Delta as the hero, won Bolen recognition and a two-book deal with Random House Canada. Alliance Films has the TV rights to Stupid Crimes and Bolen is working on a sequel, Krekshuns - street pronunciation for Corrections.
Bolen, like Wallenco, grew up on Vancouver Island where his father was a railway agent.
He is no civil servant making a midlife transition to author. Writing has been a parallel life for 20 years, mainly with short stories published in alternative literary magazines.
But looming burnout aside, Bolen still relishes his job.
"I like the idea of getting down one-to-one with someone who's misbehaved badly, getting inside their head and seeing what I can do about it." ©Vancouver Province |
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