The Bottom Line: Small town noir that is as tender as it is terrifying, GLORIA mesmerizes while asking whether the greatest mysteries live not in the world, but in our minds.
GLORIA begins in small-town Wisconsin as Henry Halder, a boy on the cusp of adolescence, loses both legs in a tragic accident. What exactly happened is elusive. While in and out of consciousness across many surgeries, he’s told theories that he must have rushed across a track before an oncoming train.
But Henry realizes an essential truth: he actually remembers nothing about the accident. It’s here that author Howard Seaborne introduces a bold narrative device: Henry’s “memories” are more than simply unreliable. They split: two vivid and contradictory outcomes of the same event. A lost toy is both lost and found. A diorama is both ruined and preserved. These dueling outcomes, as Henry explains, remain equally vivid, leaving him to puzzle whether he’s unintentionally blurring the truth. Crucially, he realizes that certain people in his life act as catalysts for these memory shifts: his sister Jeanie, his friend Mike, and most powerfully, a classmate named Gloria Wentworth who disappears.
The book’s opening chapters read like a coming of age novel, including revelations about Henry’s childhood that become clearer post-college. In the process, Seaborne plants clues that eventually play out in the form of a meticulously constructed murder mystery. An early mention of the town’s infamous “One Step Killer” begins a simmering buildup that gradually injects menace and unease into Henry’s understanding of the place where he grew up. Along the way, fond memories of Gloria Wentworth evolve into a blend of memory-based revelations and an ensuing obsession with her fate.
Seaborne’s work has always balanced suspense with affection and tenderness, but it goes to a new level with GLORIA. The small-town setting is full of ball games, bike rides, and bus rides, but also freighted with growing fear. Tonally, GLORIA is on par with Stephen King’s classic coming-of-age story The Body (a.k.a. Stand By Me). Accordingly, the power of love, friendship and family are on full display, while the nature of Henry’s dual memories, serving as both courtroom and confessional, are no less engaging than the classic cinematic thriller Memento.
Seaborne has set GLORIA in Essex County, the same location as his popular DIVISIBLE MAN series. Series fans will recognize familiar characters as well, but the novel works as a complete stand-alone.
