The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy & the King of Scarecrows: Two Novels/2 Book in 1

In the first tale, a hitchhiker called Mott visits the town of Fate, and in the second, a scarecrow travels with a group of human companions

Culbert's debut consists of two short novels, thematically linked by their characters' search through a darkened dreamscape for some sort of sanctuary. In the first, Kenjii Mott, a solitary traveler in a world where pecans and acorns are the only currency, loses his backpack full of belongings when he reaches the small town of Fate and stops at the home of a mysterious woman called Amy Survivor, obviously patterned after Keats's la belle dame sans merci. The second novella concerns The Scarecrow, a dead man who has joined a traveling freak show. These stories are not altogether bleak; rather silly and uneventful, they read like Kafka "lite." But Culbert's tone is unpleasantly self-satisfied. His invented world is altogether too cute to convince, and the writing is sometimes embarrassingly inept: "The moment of violence in the faded day faded like a fart." Only readers on a similar wavelength will enjoy these postmodern fables.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.