Collectors: A Novel - Softcover

Griner, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312271905 ISBN 13: 9780312271909

Publisher: Picador, 2001

Synopsis

At a wedding for a childhood friend, young-professional Jean Duprez, strong, self-confident but with a dark past, meets the magnetic, charming and aloof Steven Cain. The two begin an intense, obsessive affair. After an enticing afternoon on Steven's sailboat, Steven shuts a car door on Jean's hand. Intentionally? Unsure, and unable to resist Steven's charms, Jean remains fascinated. As the novel spirals to its final, shocking conclusion, we can only watch with horror and curiosity as Jean becomes ensared in Steven's sinister designs.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

        
Collectors, by critically acclaimed author Paul Griner, is an exquisitely menacing story of one woman's dangerous fascination with a seductive, mysterious man. At her cousin's wedding, Jean Duprez, an advertising-agency art director who specializes in effective but unsettling concepts for her clients, meets a handsome stranger named Steven Cain. What follows is the story of a relationship so ominous and puzzling that the reader is drawn into the author's designs as inevitably, and as helplessly, as Jean is drawn to Steven. She seeks him out although he often seems indifferent to her, she disregards his disturbing personal history, and she tells him about her own transgressions. And so it becomes intriguingly hard to say whether she is a possible victim of evil or has deliberately put herself in harm's way. The story also dramatizes the intricacies of collecting, particularly the wary bargaining between seller and buyer. In Paul Griner's hands, this dance of flea-market negotiation comes to seem nearly as sinister as the increasingly dark encounters between Jean and Steven. One is a matter of guile and folly, the other of life and death.

From the Back Cover:

"Paul Griner's Follow Me is one of the most vivid, distinctive collections I've read in years. His range of subject and technique is extraordinary: patient, complex explorations of family life, flinty fabliaux noirs, stories about doctors and artists and outlaws, all told with conviction and velocity and a sure sense of the form. Mr. Griner's book is a present joy, and a bright promise."

--Tobias Wolff

"Paul Griner is a new American writer of great promise. The stories in Follow Me are pitched at a high level, skillfully
executed and driven through with maximum velocity. Griner's characters are wonderful, and they continue to resonate in the reader's mind long after the collection has been read."
--Thom Jones

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0312271905
• ISBN 13: 9780312271909
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192