My Juliet - Hardcover

Bradley, John Ed

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385498039 ISBN 13: 9780385498036

Publisher: Doubleday, 2000

Synopsis

One of the South's best writers returns with a scorching tale of murder and sexual obsession in New Orleans

John Ed Bradley is a writer of great power and intensity whose early novels were ecstatically received by critics. It has been six years since Bradley has published a novel, and he has used that time to craft a noir tour de force that breathes new life into the Southern gothic tradition.

My Juliet tells the story of a struggling artist, Sonny LaMott, and his obsessive love for Juliet Beauvais, who is Thanatos and Eros all balled up into one nasty, irresistible package. Juliet returns to New Orleans after her years as an "actress" in California, thinking that her mother is about to die and that she will inherit the family mansion. But Juliet discovers she's been tricked by her mother, so this most fatale of femmes seeks out the damaged Sonny, who still can't resist her fifteen years after she crushed his heart. With ease, Juliet seduces him anew, nefarious purposes in mind.

Juliet is an unforgettable character, and the prose and dialogue drip with New Orleans atmosphere. The gothic elements--graveyards, kinky debauchery, decay, melodrama--are superbly rendered, yet the author's rich sense of humor and pity for his characters make it all vibrant and original. Bradley excels at stretching out an impending sense of doom that hovers over all the players, creating a delicious tension out of our expectation of the worst yet to come.

With My Juliet John Ed Bradley returns, triumphantly, to the literary scene.

About this title

Review:

In John Ed Bradley's well-wrought page-turner, doom hovers over every encounter. Sonny LaMott is a down-and-out painter in New Orleans, selling bad portraits to tourists for $40 a pop. Years ago the city seemed romantic and important to him, a place fit for a Tennessee Williams backdrop. These days all that has turned into cliché. Everything he paints looks like something from a gift shop postcard. The real reason for Sonny's cynicism becomes clear in a scene where he watches a porn video starring the object of his adolescent desire: 15 years later, Juliet Beauvais, his femme fatale and first love, has gone into hardcore. When she returns to New Orleans unexpectedly, Sonny falls quickly under her spell again. The novel's tension resides with Juliet and her wild appeal: she can make men grovel at her feet, even kill for her. Determined to whack her mother and collect her inheritance, Juliet manipulates Sonny, trying to convince him that he's not really a cheesy artist--he's a glamorous hit man. And she's not really a drug-addled porn star, she's the woman who will save his life.

With My Juliet John Ed Bradley (Tupelo Nights, Love and Obits) proves he has a gift for crazy women. While most hard-boiled writers of this genre, including masters like James Ellroy, tend to dodge the interior lives of their screwed-up ladies, he paints a rich portrait of a woman on the edge--narcissistic, deeply damaged, unable to find peace or pleasure. She's also funny, complaining to herself that it's "oppressively, stupidly hot," and thumbing through a self-help book she finds on an airplane, "she reads half a page before encountering a trash can on the main concourse and throwing it away." Juliet doesn't believe in self-help or redemption; she believes in money, sex, her own powers of persuasion. Bradley makes her chillingly believable, and she's the one who propels this novel's atmosphere of guilt, doom, and dark pleasure. --Emily White

From the Back Cover:

Praise for My Juliet:

"My Juliet is lowdown Cajun-flavored James M. Cain--drenched with plenty of doomed sex, besotted men, murder, money, and of course that all-American pastime, betrayal."
-- Elwood Reid, author of Midnight Sun and What Salmon Know

"John Ed Bradley is one of the finest writers of his generation, and My Juliet is his funniest, most fascinating novel yet. This tale of obsession, New Orleans-style, will resonate with readers everywhere."
-- Mark Childress, author of Gone for Good and Crazy in Alabama

"I have not begun a single book of John Ed Bradley's that I did not feel compelled to read in a single sitting. My Juliet lives up to the shining promise of his brilliant first novel, Tupelo Nights. My Juliet is a dazzling, virtuoso performance."
-- Harry Crews, author of Celebration and A Feast of Snakes

"A tale as torrid and enticingly dangerous as the back alleys of New Orleans. In Juliet Beauvais, John Ed Bradley has rendered the perfect girlfriend-from-hell, the sort of woman every man dreads--but secretly longs to cross paths with at least once in his life."

-- Scott Anderson, author of Triage and The Man Who Tried to Save the World

"Bradley's best yet."
-- Kirkus Reviews

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0385498039
• ISBN 13: 9780385498036
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272