Wait Until Twilight: A Novel - Softcover

Pak, Sang

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061732958 ISBN 13: 9780061732959

Publisher: Harper Paperbacks, 2009

Synopsis

A hauntingly strange and powerfully affecting debut novel that heralds the arrival of a unique and captivating literary voice, Sang Pak's Wait Until Twilight is a coming-of-age story that explores the complex darkness infecting a damaged psyche in a small Southern town.

Not long after his own mother's death, sixteen-year-old Samuel discovers a set of deformed triplets hidden behind closed doors in his sleepy Georgia community. The babies—whose shut-in mother believes they were immaculately conceived and whose menacing brother is a constant threat—take control of Samuel's every waking and sleeping thought. His only escape, he realizes, will be to save the monster children. But to do so, he must rein in his darkest impulses as he undergoes a profound transformation from motherless boy to self-defined man—because sometimes the most terrible monsters are those that live inside us all.

About this title

About the Author:

Sang Pak is a Georgia-raised writer with English and psychology degrees from the University of Georgia. He is currently on hiatus from New York University's graduate program in psychology. He divides his time between Georgia, southern California, and Seoul. Wait Until Twilight is his first novel.

From Publishers Weekly:

Pak mines the South for cliché in his trifling, melodramatic coming-of-age debut. Samuel is a 10th-grade boy and the reader's guide through the fictional backwoods town of Sugweepo, Ga. The driving force is, ostensibly, the narrator's horror and fascination with a set of wildly deformed triplets. Eventually, Samuel's encounter with the babies reveals a latent violent streak within him. But between these moments lays a wasteland wherein Samuel goes about regular high school student business. These bland filler passages sometimes lead to go-nowhere developments, such as Samuel's dead mother's friend, whom Samuel is attracted to. There is some indication she might be trying to seduce him, but the idea is quickly abandoned. The prose, meanwhile, is mundane (opening sentence: The sun sits flat against the blue sky like someone pressed it on there with a giant thumb). The portions of the novel dealing with the deformed babies offer some respite, but are plagued by a sloppy hammering home of the book's unsubtle and uncomplicated themes. (Aug.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0061732958
• ISBN 13: 9780061732959
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 229