One of the final, fully realized works of writer Rick Hautala (1949-2013) is a beautifully written, idyllic fantasy entitled The Big Tree (published posthumously in 2014; 134 pp. with a Foreword by writer Christopher Golden and an Afterword by writer Thomas F. Monteleone.) It is a story of a rather introverted young boy and his parents, an older brother, a very small group of select friends, and most importantly, “The Big Tree,” in which kids have built a treehouse. “The Big Tree”—“the center of our neighborhood.” “The Big Tree” which knows all of the narrator’s secrets. The Big Tree is also about what happens during Hurricane Donna in 1960, and to the tree, and to the narrator—life changing events for both of them.
In The Big Tree Hautala creates a story filled with intimate, personal nostalgia that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the best of Steven King and Robert McCammon. Hautala effectively gives life to the narrator’s parents: a hard-working, somewhat aloof and easily irritated father; a caring but reserved, not to be challenged mother; and an older brother who takes every opportunity to bully and terrorize his younger brother. The narrator’s escape from the humdrum of his life certainly is not school, but in the fiction he reads, especially Tarzan books loaned to him by an perceptive teacher, occasionally thumbing through the pages of an issue of Playboy magazine, uncertain about the feelings the photographs produce in him, and most of all by spending time in the “Big Tree” and the treehouse. Hautala’s rendition of the narrator is without sentiment, and yet with heart-felt affection and accuracy.
Many of the details of the narrator’s childhood life appear torn from the life of the author himself as readers of Hautala’s autobiography, The Horror… The Horror (2009; published posthumously in 2013), will quickly realize. What is amazingly ironic is that many of the same details and emotions that Hautala at times struggles to convey in his autobiography, flow seamlessly and with conviction in The Big Tree. It is as if Hautala has to assume the fiction writer’s voice in order to write openly and convincingly about his own childhood.
The reference to the nostalgia found in the work of King and McCammon [mainly in McCammon’s novel Boy’s Life (1991)] comes from the fact that as the family almost nonchalantly prepares for and goes through the experience of Hurricane Donna, the narrator has the most of unusual experiences—first thinking he sees and then talking to a young girl, Sylvia, who is out in the storm and whose fortune appears to be incredibly tied to the fate of the “Big Tree.” As the storm does more and more damage to both the “Big Tree” and the boys’ treehouse, the narrator’s concern for Sylvia and his own helplessness to stop inevitable events becomes more and more frantic.
Along with the beauty of Hautala’s writing and pacing and the book’s real-to-life characterization and dialogue is the alluring fact that the author never reveals the truth about Sylvia—a truth even the narrator cannot determine. Is Sylvia real? An illusion? The result of an over-active imagination? Some kind of dryad or mythological creature bound to nature and the “Big Tree”? Or is she a symbol of the very real relief for a young boy’s loneliness and his lack of self-esteem and personal identity? It is an incredibly wonderful, unanswerable question left open for the reader by a very skilled writer.
The conclusion of The Big Tree has the narrator taking first steps toward becoming his own person and it is with hope, not fear, and with great satisfaction that the reader closes the covers of this lovely story.
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