Street: A Novel - Hardcover

Cady, Jack

3.35

23 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312114559 ISBN 13: 9780312114558

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1994

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The first Act is murder: a killer is preying on young women in Seattle. The victims' bodies lie strewn about the city like litter. Police efforts to stop the killer have been minimal.
Among those making a more significant effort to stop the murderer are five homeless people living in an abandoned church. Their play for the capture of the killer comprises the five Acts of this elegant, dramatic novel.
The narrator is a former TV actor who could no longer sell meaningless products to a faceless audience. His comrades include a war veteran who shouts "Felony assault!" from street corners, a disillusioned former nun, a soulful poet, and a knight-errant adrift in the twentieth century.

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About the Author:

Jack Cady teaches at Pacific Lutheran University.

From Publishers Weekly:

World Fantasy Award-winner Cady's (The Sons of Noah and Other Stories) disappointing horror novel about street people battling a serial killer of young women in Seattle is clearly, if loosely, based on that city's real-life Green River killings. The unnamed narrator (a well-to-do former actor) and four of his companions (including a Vietnam vet and an ex-nun), who live in an abandoned church called "The Sanctuary," are five of fiction's most unlikely street people. In order to track the murderer, for example, the narrator is somehow able to transform himself into any identity he chooses, including those of a 58-year-old Yankee dowager and a black jazz musician. Even if Cady is making use of the conventions of the antinovel in order to present characters that readers won't easily identify with and a "reality" that need only approximate the real, the narrator's many forays into deep-cover roles are a distractingly unconvincing element. The narrator's almost sing-song street-talk narration ventures into overblown didacticism at times, too. By the time the killer has a final face-off with the Sanctuary dwellers, readers will be checking their watches, not their pulses.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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