Tildes Book Club - January 2026 - Fire on the Mountain by Terry Bisson

It feels bad (almost shameful) to admit this, but this book slid almost completely off my brain.

I read it. The whole thing. But I don’t feel like I ever fully grasped it. It was more like sand spilling through my fingers than something I could hold on to.

I think it’s equal parts where my brain is at right now (you know, because of ::waves arms at a nondescript everything::) and also how the book was written.

This is NOT a criticism of the writing. In fact, one of the things that impressed me was that the book felt very authentic (admittedly less so in the “present” but very much so in the historical parts). Additionally, I think it’s a book that carries most of its weight not in its words but in their implications. Some books tell; some books show; and some books give you details and expect you to put together the pieces to find the bigger meaning. This is one of the latter ones. I don’t think I spent enough time earnestly considering it or mulling it over. Instead, I let its words pass over me and don’t have much to show for that.

One thing I kept forgetting was that the (great) great grandfather was writing about when he was twelve years old. I think I repeatedly forgot this because he didn’t sound like a twelve-year-old (because he’s writing as an older man) and because so many of the things he did felt more grown up than twelve. It also wasn’t entirely clear how much time had or hadn’t passed between sections, so sometimes I ended up thinking he was older than he was until I was reminded again of his age.

This hit me really hard in the scene where they hang Cricket. I thought he was older by then, and that made sense to me because he had joined the resistance.

But then there was this sentence:

I slipped forward through the crowd, making myself small, as kids can still do at twelve, until I was at the front, by the scaffold.

Reading that was like a smack in the face. Twelve and he’s at a hanging (of his brother nonetheless).

His youth gets further reinforced in the scene by what comes after it, which is utterly horrific. Some adults gleefully pick him up and push him closer to Cricket, forcing them to look at one another. That part of the book was genuinely heart-wrenching. It hit the teacher part of my soul pretty hard — the part that cares deeply for kids and wants no harm to come to them. I’m tearing up right now as I write this, because just thinking about the cruelty and the suffering of that moment hurts.

Speaking of hard-hitting, the book would occasionally have these “whallop” sentences. A lot of the book was told in a very dry or even-handed way, but occasionally a sentence would just jump right out of the page. I wish I had highlighted them so I could give better examples, but I can only remember one (emphasis mine):

“The Mericans wipe out the buffalo, string the country together with railroads and barbwire; annihilate, not just defeat, the Sioux, the Crow, the Cheyenne, the Apache, one after the other. Genocide is celebrated by adding stars to the flag.

Not all of them were as punchy as this. Sometimes they were little details with huge implications, or just thoughtful little additions that had significant depth if you stopped to think about them.

I also really liked every time they discussed John Brown’s Body, which was the in-universe alternate history that is our actual IRL history. It was interesting to frame our own timeline as a “what if?” and I really liked how the author pulled apart some of the story (i.e. our own society) via characters’ comments on it:

For a white supremacist fantasy the book has a certain grim honesty. It ends in this hideous...”

“Please,” Yasmin said. “I think I’ll pass. John Brown the traitor, huh?”

“Worse; a madman. A murderous fanatic. Lincoln, on the other hand, is a hero. The great emancipator.”

“Who does he emancipate?”

“Me,” Grissom laughed. “He emancipates the whites from having to give up any of the land they stole. From having to join the human race.”

I thought the sci-fi aspect of the book was pretty thin and unsatisfying, but I think the juxtaposition was made to emphasize the potential for progress in a short period of time. The book basically chronicles a century gap between dystopic inhuman slavery and utopian (fully automated luxury?) space communism. These drastically different settings are experienced within three generations of the same family.

As such, for as dark as the book is, it also has an indelible hope to it. In fact, tonally, it’s hard to pin down. It dares to dream of a different, better path than the one we went down, but in doing so it casts are current situation as a continuation of a dystopia. Is it optimistic for imagining a bright path? Or is it pessimistic for noting that we’re on a dark one? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s both.

I mentioned above that the book had a very authentic feel to it with regards to the historical parts, so it was a bit of a plot twist to me when I looked up the author after finishing and found out that he’s white. The whole book I thought I was reading a work from a black author, and it’s a testament to Bisson that he was able to write a book that very directly communicates the lived experiences of racism and slavery in a way that felt so perceptive and insightful.

Of course, take this with a grain of salt because, as a white guy I’m not the most qualified person to make this judgment in the first place. Speaking only from my own perspective: I think Bisson did a remarkable job of telling a story of black liberation in an earnest and skillful way.

As much as I liked a lot of the different pieces of the book, I do wish I liked the whole of it more. I will admit that I found it a chore to read in places. Some of its “authenticity” makes for turgid prose, and Bisson seems to REALLY love looooooong paragraphs that I found it all too easy to get lost in (not in the good way).

I don’t think it’s a bad book by any means. In fact, I think this book would be great for a literature class, because it almost demands a slower, more reflective reading where you can dive in deep, pull it apart, and find the meaning buried in its soil. There’s a richness and depth under the surface of the novel that I didn’t get to fully appreciate because I just skimmed along the top, reading the book to finish it and unable to really commit my full brain to it, probably because of the aforementioned everything.

I feel guilty for skipping this one as I did vote for it. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find it at my library or any other sources at an affordable cost. Normally I skip the discussion threads if I haven't read a book for fear of spoilers, but I think I'll follow along just to see what others thought of this one. The premise did intrigue me.