The Dungeon’s Made-Up; The Key Is Real

‘The Happy Valley’ by Benjamin Harnett

In the 1993–4 school year, the 12-year-old narrator meets the older June at school. It’s 7th-grade all over again in Benjamin Harnett’s new novel The Happy Valley (Serpent Key Press, 2022). June tells him about her family’s farm. The narrator realizes he had been there years ago in childcare. The farm is important; there’s a mystery room there. The story leads you away before it leads you back. Meanwhile, you can listen to the playlist.

On Storytelling

The narrator and his preteen friends are into roleplaying games. June is enthusiastic about it, joining a group of boys. They “internalized the idea that the most glittering treasure, the most spectacular finds, were concealed in the gloom of drab dungeons, filled with the skittering of mice, cobwebbed skeletons, and old chains.” Is it? Is that how the story works? Is that where the treasure is, outside the story too?

“I had the key. But I would never understand.” The story tells us that “the past, even a little fragment, lost in a box, can be the key that unlocks a great mechanism, and sets the idle gears going.” The box is hidden in the reiteration of folk tales. You search for it in “a book that both tells the tales and then seeks to explain them.” (I think of Robert Bly’s Iron…