Praise for The Beginning of Calamities
Tom House is a House on Fire! . . . a writer keen to understand the varieties of religious experience. His main character, Danny Burke, is an ardent boy who lives in an imaginary world, a world far preferable to the world of his schoolmates and family on Long Island. Inside this imaginary world God truly is compassionate, providing Danny with his first true love--a boy named Arram--and with the faith to believe that an escape into the soul is divinely possible. --Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones
There are precious few contemporary fiction writers who have taken on preteen childhood convincingly. This may have something to do with how irretrievably (and mercifully for many of us) the emotional contours of these years recede from memory by the time serious writers begin penning their prose. All of which makes Tom House's debut novel, which trenchantly evokes the travails of an outcast fifth grader, a notable debut. --The Miami Herald
Inventive 'Calamities' offers comic read on Good Book . . . The author evinces an eerie understanding of the erotic jolt that certain Bible stories and scantily clad biblical characters can give to youngsters experiencing the first pangs of sexual desire . . . Some readers might be offended by the novel's frank juxtaposition of spiritual and fleshly passion. Others will smile to remember just how exciting the Good Book could be. --The Boston Herald
[A] dazzling, wonderful book . . . House has created a story about a boy and a religious play that reads like an edge-of-your-seat thriller. What could be an ordinary coming-of-age story is instead a taut, tension-filled drama with transcendent language, moving pathos, and humor, both innocent and dark. It is almost impossible to set this book aside without agonizing over the next calamity poor Danny has to face. --The East Hampton Star [full review]
Chosen as one of the "most exciting debuts" of the spring/summer 2003 season . . . This first novel by an accomplished short story writer is set in the mid-1970s in a blue-collar Long Island town. Shy, awkward, 11-year-old Danny re-creates the Passion of Christ as a school play to be performed for his fellow parochial school students during Holy Week. Impressed by his initiative, Danny's young teacher, Liz Kaigh, gets caught up in producing and directing the piece, whose troupe of players is eventually composed of the class misfits. The author effectively depicts Danny's constant personal angst and spiritual longings within the context of religious suffering but also manages to add a note of dark humor. Danny's sexual awakening is also presented, as is his yearning for acceptance in his creation of an imaginary friend. Mixing pathos, irreverence, and a sense of befuddled impending doom, this novel is a kind of emotional roller coaster ride--one that makes the curious reader hold on until the final pages. For the less adventurous reader, it may at times be unsettling. Recommended for larger fiction collections. --Library Journal
Dark, emotional--and often hilarious ... Danny's small blue-collar town will witness a spectacle like none they could have imagined . . . --Quality Paperback Book Club
"Best of 2003" pick ... A brave debut, brimming with originality, that accurately captures the humor, poignancy and horror of an outsider's childhood . . . Reading The Beginning of Calamities almost requires peering through fingers; you want to know what happens next, yet can't bear to look. --The Weekly News [full review]
An ideal candidate for our Violet Quill Award. We at ISO were floored by this powerful debut novel. Tom House crafts a heart-wrenching story out of an erotically and spiritually charged scenario ... Insightful, intense, and often hilarious, it's no wonder The Beginning of Calamities is getting raves from major writers. --InsightOut Book Club
Staff Pick . . . Made me gasp on almost every page. Tom House has crafted a brilliant tale that dares to bring to life the erotic obsessions of an 11-year-old boy . . . The ending is an absolute stunner. --David Rosen, ISO Editor-in-Chief
The Beginning Of Calamities by Tom House is a "reader riveting" novel about Danny Burke, a shy, eleven-year-old, fifth grade Catholic school student, whose awkwardness, difficulty fitting in, and genetic predisposition toward homosexuality, contribute to his many difficulties growing up. Danny writes a play from the Gospels called "The Passion of Christ," yet his involvement in seeing the drama through one disaster after another leads to a surprising climax. An engagingly wry and knowing tale, The Beginning of Calamities is literate and recommended reading. --Midwest Book Review
An admirable balance between farce and tragedy . . . a fine first novel, clever and moving . . . House effects a story that is sensitive, ironic, sad and at times a howling hoot. --The Independent [full review]
In shifting points of view, Danny, Liz Kaigh, and Carol Burke describe the chaos surrounding Danny's play. Then Arram, a naked slave boy and perhaps one of the best imaginary friends ever invented, jumps off the pages of a religious text to sooth Danny's anxiety. As Danny and Arram embark on a series of adventures, Arram provides Danny with the honesty, loyalty, and compassion Catholicism is about to deny him. As the auditorium fills and Danny's classmates take the stage, the momentum building throughout the novel comes to a boiling point. A thrilling series of surprises erupts--moments sure to leave Danny's Long Island town talking for decades. House is brilliant here, an expert storyteller. --Other Voices [full review]
Enjoyable, well-written and original . . . Tom House finds true passion in the imagination of childhood--the inseparable rapture of faith and desire. --Lambda Book Report
The real world terrifies, mortifies, and mystifies Danny Burke. The athletic boys at his Long Island Catholic school bully him. The banality of his home life embarrasses him. Fantasies inspired by images of Jesus bleeding on the cross confuse (and arouse) him. He's the epitome of a sissy--and he's only 11, a precocious preteen whose nascent homoerotic misery is depicted with melancholy hilarity in House's canny novel for grown-ups. To avoid the horror of recess dodge ball games, young Danny convinces his teacher to let him pen an Easter play based on the Gospels, "The Passion of Christ," emphasis on the passion. The unfortunate cast consists of fifth-grade misfits, including a narrator who lisps ("Now began the darketh hourth of Jethuth'th thuffering...") and Danny as Jesus, so into his role he drags his wooden cross to school on the morning of the ill-fated production. ("Take the back roads," his long-suffering mother pleads.) The Beginning of Calamities, an auspicious debut, is a jaunty reminder of the cruelty of childhood and a good-natured dissection of religious hysteria. --Richard Labonte, Q Syndicate
Desperate to avoid the humiliation of dodge ball, Danny Burke devises a brilliant scheme: He'll write a Passion play for his fellow fifth-graders to perform. And rehearsals will be held at recess!
By the standards of his lowbrow family, his lowbrow parochial school, and his lowbrow hometown, Danny is a prodigy. Sensitive and intense, he's not like the other roughhousing boys. In fact, he has hopeless crushes on the other roughhousing boys, and he also has an eyebrow-raising imaginary playmate, a naked youth conjured from an illustrated book of Bible stories, who inspires Danny to get naked too, in increasingly daring situations. With such a muse urging Danny on as he suddenly has to step into the role of Jesus, who can be surprised when his pubescent melodrama takes a scandalous turn?
This screwball sitcom with an iconoclastic bent will shock only the easily offended. Oddly, the most sympathetic character in this growing-up-gay tale is Miss Kaigh, the stressed-out teacher frantically trying to make lemonade out of the lemons she's been handed--the assorted playground rejects she must whip into shape as Passion players in the Gospel according to Danny. --The Boston Globe
Bronze Winner, ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Awards, literary fiction category . . . It is 1973: The Partridge Family rules the hearts of prepubescent girls on television, and music is played on vinyl records. Danny Burke, a loner in his 5th grade class at Our Lady of Perpetual Help, longs to be accepted by the popular bullies, but knows better than to push his luck. An underweight redhead with a very bad stutter, Danny realizes he's doomed when, in March, the Long Island snows melt, and it's time to face the meaner side of recess. Helpless at sports, awkward amongst his peers, Danny devises a way to stay inside the classroom--he writes an Easter play and convinces his teacher to produce it.
What begins as a ploy turns into a transformation as Danny's homosexuality awakens alongside his faith. He invents a friend, a naked boy named Arram. Together they explore the sensuality of Jesus's suffering. Danny aspires to play the part of Jesus in the play; however, his teacher, Liz, while impressed with the boy's writing, knows he could never carry it off--the pressure would be too great. Ironically, no other child in the class wants the part. In fact, only the lowest caste of students, those she thinks of as "the leper colony," children with lisps, weight problems, eyeglasses, intelligence, and/or a non-white racial background, are interested in participating at all.
Liz is a first-year teacher, and not quite grown up. She sneaks out of class for cigarettes and tries desperately to please the senior teachers. She instinctively rebels against being associated with the players, unable to convince the cool kids to take part. "She notes with bitter envy their graceful, confident movements, and notes what fine actors they'd make, possessing, as they do, the world's good regard."
Who does not want the world's good regard? It's easy to empathize with both Liz and Danny. In fact, the reader might empathize too readily, squirming at painfully resurrected memories of classroom bullies, the desire to be liked, the terror of speaking before a large group of peers for the first time . . . House, who has published in Harper's, New England Review, and Best American Gay Fiction, has command of lyrical, truthful prose. His language carries the story along, and the outcome is not as hopeless as it first may seem. --ForeWord Magazine