A Green Glow on the Horizon, book review

A Green Glow on the Horizon
Dawn Burns
Cornerstone Press, 2026

Green Glow is a collection of linked stories supposedly compiled by an editor and written by survivors of tourist traps. The subtitle is: Tales from the National Association of Tourist Attraction Survivors. NATAS. It seems legit—but what is this book, the stories, really about?

What are they really fighting against?

I know Dawn Burns and her background and I have a good guess. The last story is about finding paradise in Hell. That is, Hell, Michigan—another made-up place?!

I’ve actually been there. To the restaurant, the billboard, and putt-putt golf venue. It exists—but is it real? But I’m getting ahead of myself with existential questions. One may as well ask if Las Vegas is real or Heaven/heaven or any number of places that may or may not exist. And who gets to decide.

I guess that’s what the book is about/asking.

Let me pose my own question in the form of an anecdote. All across campuses, institutional sites there are planned walkways. Most pedestrians stay on the path, but there are a few who, either because they slept late, their alarm didn’t go off, or pure rebellious/anti walkway behavior, cannot take the “right” way, but veer off and create a spur, a scar in the grass. And, eventually this new way becomes a defacto path. So the school, hospital, whatever comes around and paves the “shortcut” giving it legitimacy. Until . . . another populous path is spontaneously created and the institution must decide to pave it as well.

Same thing with re-wilded spaces. The old mall’s parking lot falls into decay and rubble, grass grows up between the asphalt cracks. The lot is fenced off. Eventually trees and other plants take over. Animals discover this new space and, before you know it, it’s like the New World before the white man. Maybe. But you get the point.

The point being: There’s always going to be folks following the beat of a different drum. Who fall, head over heels, for a perversion, an inauthentic attraction.

The stories are about belief, rational and irrational thinking, the ability to lose one’s self in fabrication and fantasy and inhibit the exhibit—according to one of the stories where the character actually grows up sleeping at a county museum in the display about a local serial killer. In another story Bud Blackenberry so identifies with Celestial Seasonings tea that he steeps himself in a bath of peppermint tea. “When faced with two worlds that one cannot reconcile, I did what so many are compelled to do; I chose to live even more fervently inside my Celestial Seasonings tea box world, this time in defiance of reality.”

A Green Glow on the Horizon took Daw Burns a long while to write. Maybe it was her own version of therapy, to answer childhood trauma, or simply question the path she was on.

Some readers might want to chuckle or say: Thank God that isn’t me. Really? I’d never lose myself in a cult. Hmmm. What about your adherence to Monday Night football or the reality TV show Survivor.

We all have our stuff. The world we cling to even in the face of evidence or other proofs. We are human, and as human we contain ambiguity, contradiction, doubt, mystery. A bit of wishful thinking or desire for magic. Even before the wooly mammoth died out early man was coining myth. We need alternative worlds in order to survive this world. We need the distraction of attraction.

The 13 stories (is there significance to this number? Should there have been 666?) create a framework to ask questions and explore the inner psyche of why we deviate from the known into the unknown. Who knows why we stop and pull over—just to look.