Dog Horse Rat - Softcover

Davis, Christopher

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0595091989 ISBN 13: 9780595091980

Publisher: iUniverse, 2000

Synopsis

"...a moving study of post-vietnam voices and the spell of randomness and acceptable violence under which we've lately fallen. In all of his books Mr. Davis is a master of the quietly engineered sentence. His prose is a form of plainsong that disguises the sophistication of his method but never the breadth of his understanding and compassion."
-American Academy & Institute of Arts & Letters, May 1991

About this title

About the Author:

Christopher Davis is the author of ten novels, two books of nonfiction, a children's book, two plays, and numerous essays. His novel A Peep Into The 20th Century was a National Book Award nominee. In 1991 he received The Career Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

From Publishers Weekly:

Van and Royal West are brothers in an upstate New York town dominated by a prison, a few bars and sense of having been cut adrift from history. By all accounts, the splendidly pastoral hamlet of Whitehead is a cultural backwater. Although organized around shared beliefs, the citizenry is too close, "cutting across generations. If you knew a man's son, then the father was a friend. You took their daughters out . . . they came to your football games." This is the tawdry backdrop for a senseless crime: the brothers, surprised while robbing the summer home of a well-to-do professor from Connecticut, kill the man's gifted son, and proceed to avoid detection--and their own culpability--by becoming involved in a depressing series of squabbles with family and townfolk. The portrait of Van, a Vietnam vet, is chilling evidence of the excesses a closed society will abide from one of its own; the younger Royal, a true innocent at the start, plunges into self-victimization. Davis ( A Peep into the Twentieth Century ) conveys perfectly the parochialism of small-town life, but the inevitability of the events he sets in motion robs the tale of affecting verisimilitude.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: iUniverse
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0595091989
• ISBN 13: 9780595091980
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 252