Percolations

When perusing through rows and stacks of books, one usually gets the feeling that the books are scrutinizing the peruser and not the other way around. Such was the case when I arrived at the one lure I could not pass, Thomas Mullen. The Last Town on Earth opened its pages and sucked me in. I wasn’t just reading uncharted words by an unknown writer, I instantly became those words. Such a scintillating foretaste that I ventured further through the bouquet and dust of the many rows of floor to ceiling books until Mullen plucked another one in front of me, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers.

Isn’t it interesting, not having ever heard of this author, how he gently prodded until I had both his books in hand and he managed to finagle his way into my world? He must have heard of my collection, envying to be a part of it.

This morn’ as I was reading the usual 'Book Blogging' suspects, I found the fact that a negative review had engaged me. Intriguing. I had to investigate, of course. Peter S. Beagle is, yet again another author I‘ve never heard of. When I inched open A Fine and Private Place, and began reading, I found the scrawled words he’d penned when he was only 19, piercing me from beneath my skin. I began inhaling its scent as though I were listening to a melody that was thumping inside my chest. I knew immediately that what this one reviewer had failed to sense, was the story's unreserved depth of darkness. Exactly my cup of tea.

 

[2006] Random House (hardcover edition)
James Fenimore Cooper Prize for excellence in historical fiction. Inspired by a little-known historical footnote regarding a town that quarantines itself against the 1918 flu pandemic during the backdrop of WW1.

 [2010] Random House (softcover)
Follows the exploits -- and the deaths -- of two young men who lead a well-publicized life of crime during the Great Depression of 1934.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
[1960] Viking
Reissued [2007] Tachyon Publications (softcover)
A fantasy fiction gothic layered in a temporal paradox of an unlikely friendship between two ghosts and the living, in a fine and private graveyard.