STIGMA AND THE CAVE (P) Format: Paperback

These two novels complete D. H. Melhem’s trilogy, Patrimonies, that began with <i>Blight.</i> <i>Stigma,</i> a dark political satire, and <i>The Cave,</i> a post-nuclear fantasy, confront the crucial issue facing this generation: what kind of world will be our legacy? Unsettling and sometimes terrifying, both novels center on ideological paradoxes created by a military-industrial government pitted against American individualist politics. <i>Stigma</i> offers a vision of civil unrest, unemployment, and a chronic state of war. Books are recycled as toilet paper. Families are conscripted by lottery for the honor of war-work. Selected adults serve in a bizarre bomb factory. Youths are inducted into military service, children relegated to orphanages. Scathing yet awash in dark humor, Stigma relates one family’s struggle to survive in and escape a system of perversity and horror. <i>The Cave</i> describes a motley group of people who flee to an abandoned cave, seeking shelter from a nuclear attack. Inside, viciousness, cowardice, and heroic gestures ironically transform their lives into a war. Tensions between family relations and newly formed alliances, communal needs and individual desires, religious beliefs and stark reality move toward a cataclysmic finale, in which one man retrieves a sign of faith. Sparsely poetic, simple in tone but rich in allusion, Melhem’s writing in <i>The Cave,</i> as in<i> Stigma</i> and in<i> Blight,</i> beckons readers to lift themselves out of their own lived reality, to look at the strange and threatening clouds on the not-so-distant horizon.

<b>D. H. Melhem</b>, poet, novelist, scholar, has won an American Book Award, the RAWI Lifetime Achievement Award, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, and other honors.