Children of the damned

Stefan Kiesbye’s second novel, “Your House is on Fire, Your Children All Gone,” is a dark story ripe for Halloween.

In a German village bordering the Hemmersmoor, four children grow up in a world of long-held superstitions and pagan rituals. They come of age to confront the village’s deep secrets.

The novel is set in the present, not distant medieval times.

	“Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone” by Stefan Kiesbye Penguin, $15, 198 pp.

“I grew up on the Devil’s Moor, a real landscape in northern Germany. It’s as described in the book – very flat, barren but it has a weird charm, often very grainy, beautiful on a summer night. But it also has the dark legends about the area,” Kiesbye said in a phone interview from Portales, where he teaches in the creative writing program at Eastern New Mexico University.

“The giant I mention in the book, that’s a real giant. He really did exist.”

Kiesbye said he grew up aware of European and world events but he was also steeped in the area’s fairy tales and legends.

The first ghost story he heard was from his maternal grandmother. She told him she had seen her husband, who had died on the Russian front during World War II, coming toward her.

“She called out for him and he appeared to her. That was totally normal on my mother’s side of the family,” Kiesbye said.

“There was the Lutheran Church, but there were also fortune tellers, ghosts, witches, weird things. Something between heaven and earth we didn’t know about.”

Thinking back on his youth, he liked the atmosphere of darkness yet it was full of beauty.

Still, lingering beliefs in superstitions could also be oppressive. So Kiesbye moved to Berlin.

The big city was a cure for his small-town blues. He’s lived in the United States for the last 16 years. He moved to Portales two months ago from Southern California, where he had taught freshman composition at Loyola Marymount University and adult education classes at UCLA. Kiesbye had earlier studied in Buffalo, N.Y.

ENMU brought him in to design a creative writing minor and build up the program, he said.

The school, Kiesbye said, had creative writing classes when the late sci-fi author Jack Williamson had taught there.

Kiesbye’s first book, “Next Door Lived a Girl,” won the Low Fidelity Press Novella Award.