Book Review: Dorp Dead

Title: Dorp Dead

Author: Julia Cunningham

Date: 1965

Publisher: Pantheon / Random House

ISBN: none

Length: 88 pages

Illustrations: drawings by James Spanfeller

Quote: "Maybe I really did understand last night when I moved the five ladders from their places. I half-knew what it would do to this strange, time-controlled person who, for some reason I can't discover, gives me good shelter, clothes, food, an opportunity to learn, and a refuge from the disjointed, bonging world of the orphanage."

Gillford Ground is a gifted dyslexic who didn't fit in at the orphanage. So he was glad when Mr. Kobalt, the town eccentric, offered him a foster home. During the course of this short novel, however, Kobalt reveals himself to be more than merely eccentric. How much abuse--of himself or of the dog in the house--will Gilly take before he steps out on his own?

The dedication of this book to "Tuppy" links it to Tuppenny, a story even more unlikely than Dorp Dead, in which an orphan deliberately seeks out a whole series of abusive foster parents. In her published notes on the two short novels, Cunningham described the original Tuppy as a fine but self-destructive person. In Tuppenny, the heroine eventually reveals herself as a sort of angel, a super-kid who heals the wounds for some families, reveals the incurable insanity of the worst family, and returns after her apparent murder to let her friends know that she is "free...of what looked like death." (Odd, self-conscious word choices are characteristic of Cunningham characters.)

Gilly is more credible than Tuppenny at first, but when he considers moving out into the woods with a friend of his own choice, we realize that, at best, we're reading about a time long before 1965. Gilly is still supposed to be eleven years old.

Both stories leave one wanting to know more about who Julia Cunningham was, and what her experience with orphans and foster parents had been, than Cunningham seems ever to have wanted readers to know.

Though published as a children's story, Dorp Dead isn't one. The language is intended to interest adults, not tell a story for children. Real ten- and eleven-year-olds, even if their vocabulary is wider than Gilly's and they can relate to his quirks, may be unable to follow the story. I recommend this book for adults to read, and share with children at their discretion. I think Dorp Dead might be most useful to two kinds of readers: (1) adults who want to vent unhappy memories and avoid creating traumatic memories for children, and (2) people who've been piqued by Cunningham's few, short, unlikely, yet compelling books and want to read them all.