From the Wayback: Where the Red Fern Grows

The other day I got to thinking that there are a crapton of books from my childhood I barely remember. Countless novels I either napped through as they were read aloud to the class or that I churned through so quickly in order to claim my Book It! points that I barely processed a word. In retrospect, as an adult, I regret conducting myself in such a half-assed manner, because a lot of the books involved were American classics. So I’m going to use my website to rectify this wrong. Rather than look up summaries of the countless novels in question, I’m going to write down what I recall from them and you, the reader, will help me fill in the blanks via your comments and Tweets. If nothing else, it should be a fun experiment.


I’m going to start this series with Where the Red Fern Grows, a lovely novel about a boy and his two dogs that I have exactly two memories of. The first? That the boy and his hounds spent most of the book coonin’. You see, as a child, I prided myself in my incredibly advanced knowledge of racial and ethnic slurs. I think I was literally the only kid in the class who howled with delight each time my teacher spoke the words “coon” or “coon hunt.” There was one extended paragraph about skinning coon pelts that almost caused me to crap my drawers I was laughing so hard.

My other memory from Where the Red Fern Grows? Its ending, possibly the most tearjerking and unnecessarily cruel scene in fiction outside of Johnny 5’s savage beatdown in Short Circuit 2. Boy (I don’t remember the protagonist’s name) gets into a fight with a mountain lion, his trusty hounds Old Dan and Little Ann by his side. Old Dan starts tangling with the mountain lion long enough for Boy to bury a hatchet right in its skull, which is how the book should have ended if even a shred of our childhood innocence was to be preserved. Instead, as best as I can recall, the trio starts hiking back home when Boy notices a rustling noise. He does a little investigating and realizes it’s being caused by Old Dan’s goddamn entrails dragging through the leaves because the mountain lion gutted him like a hog. Boy has to unwind his dog’s poop tubes from the bushes and carry him home, where his parents wash Dan’s intestines in a pan of soapy water like a shirt with a mustard stain and then shove them back in Dan’s emptied chest cavity, stitching him up like an effing football. Astoundingly enough, Dan dies a few hours later! Then, to top it all off, Little Ann lies down on Old Dan’s grave and dies of a broken heart! The author should have gone for broke and let Boy walk in on his parents copulating that night, his father exclaiming “There is no Santa and you’re adopted!” because the door opening mid-coitus startled him so.


So help me out, people. If you have any Where the Red Fern Grows memories you can share, I want to read them. There had to be parts of the novel that weren’t wretchedly agonizing. There just had to.