Unhallowed Ground - Hardcover

Guernsey, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688063667 ISBN 13: 9780688063665

Publisher: William Morrow & Co, 1986

Synopsis

The swamp that adjoins a small-backwoods Connecticut community retains an aura of evil and becomes the focus of seventeen-year-old Danny Moreno's search for his father and brother, who disappeared separately several years earlier

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

This beautifully executed first novelsets 17-year old Manny Moreno, the sonof a Chilean immigrant and a descendantof New England Yankees, against incomprehensible, intractable and criminalelements of society. Living in a jerry-built shack with a drunken, promiscuous mother and a retarded sister, Manny haunts the nearby Connecticut swamp flushing deer as well as a pack of crazed dogs. The swamp is owned by Manny's employer, crippled millionaire William Cahill, cruel, arrogant and vicious. Manny seeks meaning from his world in the myths spun by his grandfather, Nat Tarbox. It is from these tales and it isin the swamp that Manny uncovers the riddle of his father's and his brother'sdisappearances years before. Totally in command of his narrative, equally skillful in capturing emotional nuances and evoking the natural world, Guernsey makes a bizarre situation credible by populating it with vivid characters, each of whom is memorable by virtue of a clearly articulated motivation.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Manuel Morenco, a 17-year-old Chilean-Yankee crossbreed, languishes in the backwoods of Connecticut with a head full of marijuana and ghost stories, brooding on his father's desertion, his mother's pill problem, and his sister's insanity. A high school dropout and borderline delinquent, Manny feels lucky to land a job at the Cahill mansion, where he tends the fruit trees and spies on his boss's nubile granddaughter. Meanwhile, sinister goings-on in the town swamp, supposedly haunted by Indians and early settlers, threaten to disrupt the entire community. Unhallowed Ground is an ambitious coming-of-age novel grafted onto a predictable Stephen King-type thriller. Though only partially successful, it would be a suitable addition for most fiction collections. Edward B. St. John, Loyola Marymount Univ. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: William Morrow & Co
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0688063667
• ISBN 13: 9780688063665
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 311