Analyzing the Craft of Kat Ellis’s “Burden Falls”
Kat Ellis’s Burden Falls is a master class in how one can use point of view to create suspense and intimacy with a character. Burden Falls follows Ava Thorn, the last daughter of the Thorn family, as she attempts to solve the mystery surrounding the deaths of a classmate, Freya, and her best friend Ford. Ava also has to deal with the ever-present threat of Dead-Eye Sadie, a ghost that supposedly haunts the Thorn Estate.
Ellis utilizes a first-person, present tense point of view, allowing Ava to interject her own thoughts at several points throughout the novel. This especially becomes poignant when Ava begins to hallucinate things that aren’t actually there—people walking outside her bedroom door, Freya’s eyeless corpse sitting in the passenger seat of the school counselor’s car, and the scars on her hands opening up to reveal eyes beneath them. “The scar opens, edges parting to reveal a pocket in the flesh. Then another scar opens, and another….They almost look like…Eye sockets” (261). These moments of intense hallucination become grounded in Ava’s reality, as even this discussion of the scars opening to show “eye sockets” fit with Ava’s obsession with not only Dead-Eye Sadie but also the evil eyes that pock the entirety of Burden Falls.
Ellis’s choice for a first-person, present tense point of view also creates a heightened sense of urgency with each death that Ava encounters. When she discovers Freya’s body in the pavilion, Ellis’s handling of the point of view makes the discovery horrifying. “[Freya] just sits there with her dead eyes, her pale hands in her lap like she’s waiting for something. Her dead…” (113). The urgency that the first-person present tense point of view gives the readers makes the mystery seem far more dangerous to Ava as the story progresses.
However, where Ellis’s use of point of view really shines is when one of the plot twists reveals itself to readers. Readers are informed that Ava has actually been drugged by Freya and Ford’s murderer, meaning that each of the hallucinations that Ava faced throughout the novel weren’t manifestations of Ava’s trauma but rather a side-effect of the drugs that they had been microdosing her with. Readers get several hints throughout the novel that something is off, as Ava mentions that her coffee is bitter, but it isn’t until later on that readers get this interesting line: “[The coffee] is creamy and sweet, but without the bitter afternote I’m used to” (247). Ellis keeps the readers’ view so intensely on Ava’s experiences that at first read this may be attributed to Ava spending time with her love interest, but upon second read through, the actual reason for this line’s inclusion becomes clearer.
Burden Falls provides an interesting take on the mystery YA genre by adding a supernatural twist to it. Without Ellis’s careful use of point of view and the intimacy we as readers get following Ava before the plot twist, many of the more horrifying moments of the novel would be watered down, and the gut punch plot twist would not have been as impactful.
