Max Raymond, a weak Christian saxophonist, is the only thing that stands between the evil and murderous depradations of Man Mortimer, a gambler and killer, and the inhabitants of a small lake community near Vicksburg. By the author of Geronimo Rex. 25,000 first printing.
Hallelujah! After a 10-year absence, Hannah (Airships; High Lonesome) is back with a vengeance with a Southern gothic novel full of every kind of excess: violence, sex, religiosity, creepiness and humor. Here we have Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor, Harry Crews, Peter Dexter and Clyde Edgerton all squished together, baked in hush-puppy batter, dipped in honey and sprinkled with Jim Beam. Set in a lake community in the vicinity of Vicksburg, Miss., the story revolves around a fellow named Man Mortimer, a thief, pimp and murderer and those are his good qualities who physically resembles the late country singer Conway Twitty. On his trail are Byron Egan, a somewhat reformed biker-turned-preacher and prophet, and Max Raymond, a former doctor who plays saxophone in a bar band and has an attractive Cuban wife who sings, sometimes for the band, sometimes nude in her back yard. Meanwhile, the young town sheriff, distrusted since he hails from the North, manages to shock even the most degenerate denizens of the area with his affair with a luscious 72-year-old widow. The plot is kaleidoscopic, with flashes and slashes of wonder, humor and the macabre expertly mixed. Hannah tosses off linguistic gems on almost every page: "... sometimes he felt he was a whole torn country, afire in all quadrants." Describing a car, "It smelled like very lonely oil men." Reading today's fiction is too often like eating stale bread. With Hannah (finalist for the American Book Award and the National Book Award), just imagine your most mouthwatering meal, take a double helping and you've come close to the pleasure of reading this book. (July)Forecast: This is Hannah's first novel in 10 years, and arguably his finest. Grove is celebrating it with a 25,000-copy first printing, and retrospective reviews and features will ensure that readers sit up and take notice. Sales will be strongest in the South, but should be steady elsewhere, too. An evocative, Faulkneresque jacket will attract browsers.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
It has often been said, even in the pages of
Booklist, that Hannah is a stunningly talented short story writer whose novels fall short in comparison. Such believers will find vindication in his latest novel. Hannah is a magnificently, almost magically, gifted stylist. His sentences, in his novels as well as in his stories, burn into the reader's consciousness with their lush but never overly wrought metaphors. He cannot be bested when it comes to creating wildly eccentric, yet quite believable, characters, and this novel is a gallery of some of his most imaginative creations of odd, offbeat, and even vile folk. But the plot fails to hold them in a cohesive story. In a little community centered on a lake near Vicksburg, Mississippi, the main figure is Man Mortimer, a troublemaker from way back, about whom it is said, "Something about him canceled scruples in women." Man Mortimer's impact on his fellow lakeside dwellers causes bloodshed, intense sexual gratification, and religious duplicity to break out around him like a pox.
Brad HooperCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reservedHannah's first novel in ten years (since Never Die) concerns a motley group of eccentrics living along a lake near Vicksburg, MS. Among them are Man Mortimer, who resembles the late country singer Conway Twitty and has his hand in nearly every kind of evil in the area; Max Raymond, an ex-doctor turned saxophonist; Mimi, his smoldering, Cuban-born wife and singer with their Latin band; Sheriff Facetto, a young lawman and amateur actor in love with a still-attractive 72-year-old widow, Melanie Wooten; and Gene and Penny Ten Hoor, who run a cult-like camp for orphans. The plot revolves around the increasingly malevolent consequences of Mortimer's attempts to retrieve some bones, evidence of an old crime, found by the children of a former lover in the trunk of a 1948 Ford coupe. This is a wildly colorful, darkly comic, and ultimately sinister tale of madness and murder. For larger public libraries. Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
