A Fine Dark Line - Hardcover

Lansdale, Joe R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0892967293 ISBN 13: 9780892967292

Publisher: Mysterious Press, 2003

Synopsis

For young Stanley Mitchell, Jr., 1958 is quickly becoming a year of newfound joys and thrilling adventure. Beginning with the discovery of hidden love letters, and an uneasy meeting with Buster Lighthorse Smith, the Dewdrop Drive-in's elderly projectionist and former reservation policeman, Stanley learns about blues music, Sherlock Holmes, racism, and lost dreams. Through the natural course of growing up, he discovers the true nature of his father's heart; the love of his mother and sister and house servant, Rosy; and becomes involved in a forbidden world that exists beneath Dewmont, Texas, like dirt and bacteria beneath a beautiful carpet. Stanley enters a forbidden world of secrets filled with death and darkness, jealous lovers, and ghostly occurrences-until he finds the real murderer of the young girl who wrote the love letters he found, and becomes the murderer's next target.

About this title

About the Author

Joe. R. Lansdale has won the British Fantasy Award, the American Horror Award, and six Bram Stoker Awards. He lives in Nacogdoches, Texas.

Reviews

The atmosphere is as thick as an East Texas summer day in Edgar-winner Lansdale's (The Bottoms) engaging, multilayered regional mystery, which harks back to 1958. Thirteen-year-old Stanley Mitchel, Jr., has enough on his hands just growing up in Dewmont, Tex., when he literally stumbles on a buried cache of love letters. Stanley pursues the identity of the two lovers with help from the projectionist at his family's drive-in, an aged black man who quotes Sherlock Holmes and doesn't mince words about the world's injustices. As the truth of a gruesome 20-year-old double murder comes to light in the sleepy town, so do the facts of life, death, men, women and race for young Stanley. Unfortunately, this wealth of experience sometimes strains credulity. For instance, Stanley, his sister, Callie, and friend Richard witness a secret burial, see a local phantom, are chased by a murderer and barely miss being hit by a train-all in one night. As the older and wiser Stanley says of the past, "More had happened to my family in one summer than had happened in my entire life." The "down-home" dialect is occasionally overdone, too, with more ripe sayings than Ross Perot on caffeine. But Lansdale clearly knows and loves his subject and enlivens his haunting coming-of-age tale with touches of folklore and humor.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Lansdale makes a rich stew of memory and mystery in the voice of Stanley Mitchel Jr., who is 13 in 1958 and is writing down, in midlife, what he recalls. His parents own the drive-in in Dewmont, Texas; his dad calls his mom "Gal"; his sister, Callie, is turn-your-head pretty and feisty besides. Stanley finds in the burnt ruins behind the drive-in a cache of love letters. Stanley--innocent enough at the beginning of the story to still believe in Santa Claus--is fascinated by the letters and soon learns that the fire marked the deaths of two young women, long ago. Those deaths ripple through the pages, as Stanley struggles with knowledge of good and evil: his friend Richard's abusive dad; the black cook's stalker boyfriend; the drive-in projectionist who faces twin demons of age and alcohol. Stanley's mother, father, and sister are vivid, glowing personages. Stanley doesn't unravel everything, but race and power, and what people do to each other in the name of desire and religion, coalesce to a mighty climax. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Mysterious Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0892967293
• ISBN 13: 9780892967292
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304