The Bright ForeverThe Bright Forever

A painful, agonizing tale of guilt and loss, a tragedy told with all the tortured wisdom of hindsight and plenty of psychological damage to go around. On a sleepy summer evening in a tiny Indiana town in the 1970s, nine-year-old Katie Mackey rushes out of her house and hops on her bike to return an overdue library book - never to return. Narrated with thirty years of retrospective by Henry Dees, the reclusive, lonely math tutor who had been giving Katie summer lessons, Martin's narrative plunges into the minds of each of its characters in order to reveal the darkness behind the pastoral facade. Katie's father, Junior, owns the glassworks that employs a sizeable portion of the town's residents. Her family is akin to royalty in this simple world, envied by many for what seems to be a picture-perfect life. But pictures are only snapshots of reality, and only capture moments, not the entirety of existence. In this case, the reality is that Katie's family will never see her alive again - and the guilt crashes in on all of them, as well as many others. Because Martin's point isn't so much the mystery as it is the anguish: the mental instant replay that constantly has people saying "if only."