The Storm at the Door

Stefan Block

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Year: 2011
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780571269624
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Just outside Boston, in 1963, Frederick Merrill found himself a patient in the country's premiere mental hospital, a world of structured authority and absolute control - a forced regression to a simpler time even as the pace of the outside world accelerated into modernity.

Meanwhile, in a wintry New Hampshire village hours to the north, Frederick's wife Katharine struggled to hold together her fracturing family and to heal from the wounds of her husband's affliction. Nearly fifty years later, a writer in his twenties attempts to comprehend his grandparents' story from that turbulent time, a moment in his family's history that continues to cast a long shadow over his own young life.

Spanning generations and genres, The Storm at the Door blends memory and imagination, historical fact and compulsive storytelling, to offer a meditation on how our love for one another and the stories we tell ourselves allow us to endure. Quietly incisive and unflinchingly honest, The Storm at the Door juxtaposes the visceral physical world of Frederick's asylum with an exploration of how the subtlest damages can for ever alter a family's fate.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Table of Contents
• AUTHOR’S NOTE
• We must always be vigilant
• The sadness of distance
• It hadn’t been her decision, had it?
• The vast unknowable
• The stronger will
• Order to all things
• Everyone knows
• Horrorland
• That was Katharine
• Near-visions and half-whispers
• Another possibility
• The language the dead speak
• Exhaustion or fear?
• Nothing will be restrained
• The weight of it
• Silence and sounds
• As vast as all things
• The words
• Someplace else entirely
• What happened
• And yet, for moments
• About the Author
• By the Same Author
• Copyright