The Last Book of Christine Vale

In this week’s story, Kat Howard skillfully takes us on a deep dive into a mysterious disappearance, and the stories that emerge. ~ Julian and Fran, May 19, 2024

This month’s stories are by authors Jeffrey Ford, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Kat Howard, and Eugenia Triantafyllou. The first story of the month is free to read, but it’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep publishing great stories week after week.

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The Last Book of Christine Vale

by Kat Howard

Christine Vale was your favorite author. You have all her books, in multiple editions. You have your original reading copies, all worn from use. You have second copies that you’ve underlined and annotated. Your most prized possession is a near-fine first edition of her second novel, A Pale and Fragile Eternity. It’s the thing you would save if your house caught on fire.

Christine Vale’s house did. Her house caught on fire, and she disappeared, presumed dead. It was devastating to you, and more so because she had been rumored to be working on a new book then. She’d never confirmed it, but there were coy posts on social media—softly lit photos of blurred handwriting, only the color of the ink clear, a rich midnight blue. And then she was gone, and whatever she had been working on with her.

Except it wasn’t. Not entirely.

Pages had been found in the fire. Pages that had been restored as much as possible, and were now—three years after the fire, three years after the last time anyone had seen Christine Vale—on display here, at Vale’s alma mater, Meadowbrook University. And so you are here as well.

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Welcome to our exhibit of the books and ephemera of Meadowbrook alumna Christine Vale. Fragile Eternities includes editions of all four of her published novels, various juvenilia, and unpublished work, including pieces submitted to but not published in Inked Longings, Meadowbrook’s literary magazine, as well as the recently discovered and restored material popularly known as The Lost Book of Christine Vale. Flash photography is strictly prohibited. Tag us on social @meadowbrooklib #FragileEternities.

The restored pages are the centerpiece of the exhibit. Your eyes are drawn to them, but you walk around the edges of the display first. It’s overwhelming—the idea that these are the last new words from Vale you will ever read. You need time to settle yourself. Even though you came here for that very purpose—to read what you could, to try to piece together bits of that final story from what remained—you still want to put off the moment when you’ve read everything she ever wrote.

Plus, there are so many people crowded around the cases. One, dressed as Amaranth, from Vale’s debut novel, Starstruck Madwoman, is weeping. You want to give her space. You worry that you will weep too, and you’d rather not do it pressed in amongst a crowd of people.

*****

I find it so strange to be back at Meadowbrook. I was happy here, yes, but I wasn’t myself yet. And while the person I was then fit this place, it was never a place I would have called home. Not the sort of place I thought I’d haunt, if haunting is what I’m doing.