A Million Tiny Missiles All at Once

Lucas Maxwell’s first published novel is the winner of the 2024 Times/Chicken House Children’s Fiction Award. The words of its title appear in the novel itself to describe the impact of driving snow. The action takes place in a small Canadian town in a ‘bone-cold’ winter, and Elias has many ways of describing the biting cold and the way it seems to shape the lives of those around him. As his mother and father argue, he hears the house itself creak and ‘the wind seems to seep through the cracks in the walls to grab me by the throat.’ His walk from home to school is an exercise in survival that conjures up films he has seen of arctic explorers dying from poisoned canned food or menaced by ‘real bad things that crawl around your brain.’ When he gets to school, conditions are not much better. There it’s the other kids – ‘eyes full of sleep and boredom’ – making the bad weather. Elias knows he is autistic and that makes him a target. The novel begins with his faded memories of being kidnapped as a four-year-old on the promise of potato chips. And he knows, too, that he himself gets angry with people: ‘they just saw something that they could ruin and then went ahead and ruined it just because. It made me feel that there is nothing good out there at all.’ It’s a disillusion and barely suppressed fury that he presents to us in every word that he uses to tell his story. But it’s shaped and tempered by an instinctive irony and humour. He fancies himself as a stand-up comedian and the novel tracks his preparation for the school talent competition, peppering the narrative with his rehearsed one-liners and, incidentally, lightening the mood for the reader. It’s also a tale threaded through with the redemptive power of rough family love: from his parents, and, most of all, from and for his elder brother, Bo. The opening chapter is less about the kidnap itself and more about the lengths to which his parents, and especially Bo, go to find Elias. The subsequent story is how, in turn, Elias and his parents struggle to reach and support Bo when he goes off the rails. This is an impressive novel that should be read and enjoyed by both adults and teenagers. It has a pared back semi-colloquial style, telling an edgy story, spiked with discomforting images, that bring the winter and the weather-beaten town and its inhabitants vividly to life. At times, it reads like poetry. Towards the end of the novel, here’s Elias chopping wood for Crawford, a friend of the family: ‘There is a rhythm to it that is like a song. Wood on the stump, chop, wood on the stump, chop…When the wood was done… I made my way up the steps, my arms heavy, my muscles singing like wild baby birds hungry for their parents.’ Well worth the five stars.