A Good Baby (First Edition)

Toker, innocent and brave, and Truman, evil and vicious, join in a battle royal to the death for beautiful Roby and a magical foundling

Like the mountain storm that opens his latest novel, Rooke's language is a riotous, tumultuous force of nature. His hillbilly characters possess a similar intensity in this bawdy, serious novel that is part allegory, part morality play and completely riveting. The night of the storm, a young mountain girl delivers a baby daughter and disappears. Next morning, Raymond Toker finds the baby under a laurel bush and takes to the mountain roads to find her a home. While Turner carries out his quest, the child's father, Truman, with teeth as rotten as his soul, drives his battered, laden car along those same paths. Also inhabiting this dark, debris-strewn landscape are three old men who recall Macbeth's Weird Sisters; the retarded, clairvoyant sister of the baby's missing mother; a blind man who knows much more than he sees; and an attractive, solitary woman recently returned to the house where, as a child, she'd witnessed her father hang her older brother. With forceful, rhythmic dialogue that only rarely departs from true, Rooke ( Shakespeare's Dog ) follows Toker and Truman to their fitting ends, his heavy hand with grotesqueries and somewhat monotone plot line redeemed by the momentum of his prose.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"We'se all driven to the road taken . . . . We'se all selected for that road without our agreement or connivance. . . ." Thus Toker, a guileless, likeable sort, must share his road with an abandoned newborn, its murdered mother, a seductive woman, and a vile, "corpsy-eyed stranger" called Truman. Part allegory and part folktale, this Good-against-Evil story is reminiscent of Stephen King's The Stand and of Manly Wade Wellman's " Silver John " series. Written without quotation marks, in the language of the King James Bible and the dialect of some lost mountain cove, the book is fascinating but difficult to read. It will appeal to a limited audience. Rooke is the author of Fat Woman and Shakespeare's Dog. -- Maurice Taylor, Brunswick Cty. Lib., Southport, N.C.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.