Review of Jørgen Brekke's Where Monsters Dwell

Where Monsters Dwell by Jørgen Brekke

Present-day seers without the benefit of oracles from Delphi have confidently predicted what the future holds for the "14ers" (babies born in 2014). Apparently, along with car keys, DVDs and light bulbs that work, dead tree books are something those little hands will never hold. I will boldly take the position that the Golden Books and Dr.Seuss are safe for a while, because tiny fingers can access them easily (no password protection) and they taste better too. It’s amazing to contemplate the disappearance of something that has been highly valued for centuries.

Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore." ("The Raven," Edgar Allan Poe)

Of course, that is because the value of a book extends far beyond the words encompassed between its covers. Sometimes, a good story can encapsulate some of the essence of the value of writing, and writers and books that have crossed the paths of many individuals and affected their lives by their very existence.

This is the case in Jørgen Brekke’s Where Monsters Dwell (translated from the Norwegian by Steven T. Murray; to be published by Minotaur on February 11, 2014).

It all starts with a book, a unique volume, the only one of its kind.

Efrahim Bond was working as a librarian in his office at the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia. He had ended up there after a somewhat nomadic career, but was satisfied because he had come across the find of a lifetime. He had fragments of a book known as The Johannes Book, written by a mendicant friar who lived in Norway during the 1500s.

It was a book handwritten on parchment, from an age when paper was becoming more common. From what Bond could read, the book contained confessions of a grisly nature. He heard a knock.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore— / While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, / As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door." / 'Tis some visiter," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door— / Only this and nothing more." ("The Raven," Edgar Allan Poe)

It was the cleaning woman at the museum who made the gruesome discovery of Efrahim Bond's remains, in a state worse than anything imagined by the master of the macabre himself, Edgar Allan Poe. Poe spent much of his childhood in Richmond, Virginia, and studied at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville before he enlisted in the military. While in Richmond, he enjoyed the full use of his mental faculties; it was only later that he began to have periods of mental problems that remain undefined to this day.

About the same time Efrahim was meeting his fate, in a Kingdom by the Sea (a/k/a Norway, by the Norwegian, the North and Barents Seas) Jon Vatten rode his disintegrating bicycle to the Gunnerus Library in Trondheim, Norway, where he worked as the chief of security. One of the main treasures of this library is The Johannes Book.

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. ("Eleonora," Edgar Allan Poe)

Vatten liked weekends best, because he had free time to work a bit on his thoughts about what actually killed Edgar Allan Poe. He was fascinated by the idea that such a preeminent writer should die destitute. He’d had the opportunity to visit the museum in Richmond, Virginia, the summer before.

"Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die." (Edgar Allan Poe)

Before Vatten got settled into his day, he was introduced to a new librarian named Siri Holm. Her avocation was to figure out the identity of the villain in any murder mystery before the end of the first third of the book. To do this, she has some interesting theories. But, perhaps, her main skill was seduction. The Gunnerus Library passed a quiet weekend, but on Monday morning a mutilated body was found in the book vault by the head of the library.

Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded.... ("The Tell-Tale Heart," Edgar Allan Poe)

The body is that of the librarian Gunna Britte Dahle, whom Siri had just replaced. Gunna had also been to the Poe museum in Richmond in recent months. The motive for the killing was unclear but it, like the murder in Richmond, had the air of fiction about it, as if it had been imagined ahead of time.

Over the Mountains / Of the Moon, / Down the Valley of the Shadow, / Ride, boldly ride ("Eldorado," Edgar Allan Poe)

Felicia Stone of the Richmond police follows her nose and some subtle clues, which lead her to the Norway connection, and she works with Chief Insp. Odd Singsaker of the Trondheim police to make sense of the madness. The murderer is not yet finished and the clues are few.

Grains of the golden sand— / How few! yet how they creep / Through my fingers to the deep, / While I weep—while I weep! ("A Dream within a Dream," Edgar Allan Poe)

Despite the fact that I found the murders extremely grisly, the story itself was intriguing.

Jørgen Brekke interweaves a marvelous history of the creation of The Johannes Book into the story, and tells the reader a fascinating tale of how anatomic dissection first became acceptable as a route to medical knowledge, then finally legal. He also gives some absorbing details of how early books were put together in the era when the basic raw materials were scarce. Imagine the excitement when, over 500 years ago, printer Teobaldo Manucci (a/k/a Aldus Manutius) invented strange little vellum-bound books that a reader could easily carry under his arm. Brekke's scattered pearls of the life history of Edgar Allan Poe were decorations on the cake.

We gave the Future to the winds, and slumbered tranquilly in the Present, weaving the dull world around us into dreams. ("The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," Edgar Allan Poe)

The pundits may be correct in their predictions of a society without dead-tree books. In my own office, magazines are disappearing since the advent of e-readers, the Kindle app and newspaper apps for smart phones. But most of the people I ask have no idea of the name of the book they are reading, nor its author––and it doesn’t seem to matter to them, because the books themselves are simply chosen because they are free or very low cost.

A niece of mine goes to a school where there are no textbooks, only iPads, and the students get along very well. I will have to check whether crayons have gone the way of cursive in this school. Surely Crayola crayons are here to stay.

In fact, the country’s first totally digital public library system opened in San Antonio, Texas this week. The place (can it really be called a library?) is called Bibliotech. Appropriately, this name is inspired in part from the Spanish word for library––biblioteca. The Oxford English Dictionary defines library as "a building or room containing collections of books, periodicals, and sometimes films and recorded music for people to read, borrow, or refer to." So it is an appropriate use of the word.

There were patrons lining up to check out the online catalog on Apple touchscreen computers and check out books on e-readers. Say goodbye to judging a book by its cover.

There have been other libraries without printed books; for one, the Tucson-Pima Public library system opened such a branch, but the people who lived in the community demanded print books be added to the shelves. I am not alone.

Note: I received a free review copy of Brekke's Where Monsters Dwell. Some versions of this review may appear elsewhere under my user name there.

Review of James McBride's The Good Lord Bird

Abolitionist John Brown

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride

The mistake central to McBride's The Good Lord Bird (August 2013, Riverhead) happens like this: It's 1856, and white abolitionist John Brown has his rifle trained on angry Pro Slavers (people who are pro-slavery) inside Dutch Henry's Tavern in Kansas Territory. All the blacks have hauled ass home, except for our narrator, then 10-year-old mulatto Henry Shackleford, and his pa, both slaves. Henry, like other black boys his age, wears a potato sack. "You and your daughter is now free," Brown says. Pa only manages, "Henry ain't a," before he is killed accidentally. Brown grabs Henry and runs, and thus begins Henry's—or Henrietta's—17 years as a black woman and the story of how he came to be the only black survivor of Brown's ill-fated raid on the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859.

Missouri, a slave state, shares a border with Kansas Territory

Before continuing with Henry's story, a little history is in order. When Kansas Territory was created by the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, the question of slavery in Kansas was left up to popular sovereignty. Unfortunately, pro-slavery Border Ruffians from the neighboring slave state of Missouri took this as an invitation to force the acceptance of slavery onto Kansans through terrorism and fraud. Most whites in Missouri were too poor to own slaves, but they hated Yankees and abolitionists and feared more free blacks living nearby. In addition, they knew that if Kansas were admitted to the Union as a free state, the balance of anti- and pro-slavery representation in the U.S. Senate would be disrupted.

Between 1854 and 1861, when free-state Kansas gained admission to the Union, there were so many violent confrontations in Kansas Territory that spilled over into western Missouri, the Territory was called "Bleeding Kansas." Most Kansas Free Staters weren't abolitionists, but they were forced to fight back against Pro Slavers.

Abolitionist John Brown had several adult sons living in Kansas Territory, and he left his wife and other children (of 22 children, 12 were still living) in upstate New York to join them. Several events in 1856 helped persuade Brown that he "couldn't have a sit-down committee meeting with the Pro Slavers and nag and commingle and jingle with 'em over punch and lemonade and go bobbing for apples with 'em" to eradicate slavery: Pro Slavers sacked Lawrence, Kansas, and South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks was proclaimed a hero in the South after he caned Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner for delivering a U.S. Senate speech in which he likened Border Ruffian violence in Kansas Territory to the rape of virgins.

Enough background history. The Good Lord Bird is rollicking tragicomedy/historical fiction that follows Old John Brown, narrator Henry (AKA "the Onion" after "she" unthinkingly ingests Brown's lucky onion and becomes Brown's walking good luck charm), and Brown's ragtag band of sons and assorted followers from their murderous attack on a Pro Slaver's homestead to battles at Black Jack and Osawatomie before the Onion is left at a Pikesville, Missouri whorehouse while Brown heads back East to fundraise, and his men disperse. After surviving several years working for whorehouse madam/businesswoman Miss Abby and the budding of understandable adolescent boy yearnings for a beautiful prostitute named Pie, Onion is back on the trail with Brown.

They head to Boston, where Brown introduces fundraising speeches with "I'm John Brown from Kansas, and I's fighting slavery." Onion hates speechifying without "joy juice," but she tells stories about how hungry and miserable she was as a slave, which are lies, since the only starving she's ever done has been in the company of Brown, who never seems to eat, and his dozen men, who sometimes dine on one measly squirrel while listening to Brown bark and pray and howl at his Holy Redeemer for hours until his son Owen, the only one who dares, stops him with a "Pa! The Pro Slavers posse (or U.S. cavalry) is coming!" Raising funds is very difficult for Brown, because white Northerners sympathetic to his anti-slavery cause want to know exactly what he plans to do with their money, and Brown, fearing U.S. government spies, refuses to divulge his plans.

Old John Brown was feared and hated by Pro Slavers
and revered by blacks and fellow abolitionists

From Boston, Onion and Brown head to Rochester, New York, for a stay with famous ex-slave and speaker Frederick Douglass, with whom Onion is hardly impressed. After that, there's a convention for black people in Canada (where they meet Harriet Tubman and Brown attempts to pick up recruits for his war against slavery), before they're back in Iowa with Brown's men, making plans for the fiasco at Harpers Ferry.

Author James McBride

As Onion relates it,  Brown's seemingly lunatic plan to capture the nation's largest arsenal of weapons and to arm an insurrection against slavery isn't surprising, given Brown's character and the bad luck that seems to follow him around (I don't mean to insinuate that Onion, his good luck charm, has a bad twin). Writer McBride's Brown is an incredibly complex man, a loving father who leaves his young ones back East while risking his own life and those of his sons in a war against slavery that he believes is ordained by God. He suffers from believing what he wants to believe. Brown never really understands many slaves would rather run from slavery than take up arms against it —although there are some tragically brave black people in this story—and his supreme confidence in God's protection no matter what the odds make him a compelling and heartbreaking figure. It's no wonder Onion can't bring herself (or himself, oh, you know what I mean) to leave him, despite several half-hearted attempts. As a boy with dark skin, Onion feels passing as a girl is only doing what all black people do in front of whites—creating a disguise in order to survive.

Given McBride's entertaining and insightful portraits of fictional blacks like Onion, Pie, and a slave named Sibonia; and the real-life Brown, his sons, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman, I wasn't surprised when The Good Lord Bird won the National Book Award this year. I strongly suggest it to people who enjoy historical fiction like John Barth's romp, The Sot-Weed Factor, in which failed English poet Ebeneezer Cooke, his sister, and their tutor travel to Maryland in the 1700s; E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, in which we meet historical figures such as Harry Houdini in turn-of-the-century New York City; and Dennis Lehane's atmospheric The Given Day, which centers around a Boston cop's family in early 20th-century Boston.

Note: McBride's Good Lord bird, whose feathers John Brown's son Frederick claims bring good luck and "understanding all your life," might be the ivory-billed woodpecker, although Kansas Territory might have been a bit northwest for one. People lucky enough to spot this large woodpecker reportedly cried, "Lord God!," and that gave it its nickname, the Lord God bird.

Hunting and overlogging drove this species near extinction in the late 1930s. For sixty years, it was feared extinct. In 2004, a sighting and sounds (characteristic tin-horn cries and double-knock pounding) were reported in the Big Woods of Arkansas, but extensive searching by ornithologists has produced no definitive evidence that the ivory-billed woodpecker still exists in America. That's very unlucky for us.

Ghosts of Christmas

But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas… as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of in the long calendar of the year when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut up hearts freely and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore… though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe it has done me good, and will do me good: and I say God bless it! (A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens)

In The Christmas Carol Murders, by Christopher Lord, we are introduced to Simon Alastair, who is the proprietor of a bookstore in the hamlet of Dickens Junction, near the Oregon coast. The town was founded by his grandfather as a tribute to Charles Dickens and the ideals he espoused in his literary works. Naturally, in the town center there is a statue of the author, and most of the businesses in the square have either Dickensian motifs or are named after one or another of the characters that Dickens brought to life. Simon's store is called Pip's Pages, the local inn is Bleak House and of course there is an Old Curiosity Shop.

Dickens Junction comes to life at Christmas, when there are several events that attract the tourists; the first of which is a series of tableaux commemorating selected scenes from A Christmas Carol. Many of the merchants in the square participate, but of late they have been pestered by a newcomer to town, Mervin Roark, who is representing a group called Marley's Enterprises. He is offering exorbitant amounts of money for the property in the environs of the square. He refuses to tell anyone what the purpose behind the purchases is. But Dickens Junction, like many places, is suffering greatly from the recession––or, as the merchants refer to it euphemistically, an economic downturn. Many could find security with this monetary offering. Before he has been in the town long he is dead, murdered in a Marleyesque fashion. Jacob Marley, who was Scrooge's business partner, is known to be as dead as a doornail. Roark is killed by a doornail. And his body is discovered at the Christmas Carol staging.

The next event is a competition for the best Dickensian village reconstruction, but this too is marred by the grotesque discovery of another body. The discussions about motive swing widely from the idea that someone who wants to preserve the village's way of life is on a rampage, to the notion that Marley Enterprises group has a subversive intent to do as much damage as possible. Simon feels that he is well placed to do some sleuthing on his hometown's behalf.

Pip

Simon is an interesting character who is a bit of an egoist. He only sells books in his store that he has read himself. If a young person comes in to buy a current book about zombies or vampires, he or she won't find it on the shelf, and Simon hopes the youngster will take My Ántonia instead and begin a life-long journey into great literature. Not that he likes all the books he has read, and he can't believe the rate at which the Ayn Rand books are vacating the shelves. He also begins to see that there is a growing interest in Rand's philosophy of individualism and the ideas that those with great minds are better than all other humans.

So, while on the surface the story is about a murderous Christmas, there is an underlying comparison between the collectivist philosophy of some of Rand's books and the idea of a social conscience that Dickens espoused. Who should be first? The group or the individual? I came out on the side that it is the time of year for the lion to lie down with the lamb.

The story has a romantic subplot that is engaging. I did have to Google the definitions of certain fashion terms that Simon knew much better than I. There were the peplum jacket, the sock monkey PJ's and, finally, kitten heels. I didn't know cats had any.

There are many quotes taken from A Christmas Carol, but I am guessing that the best known comes from the stingy Scrooge who said a great deal with two words: "Bah Humbug."

Dickens tweeting

My favorite is: "God bless us," said Tiny Tim. "God bless us, every one."

Do you have a favorite you would like to share?

There is a different tradition on the Mid-Atlantic Coast that is on many a bucket list, and that is to visit the historic Williamsburg area during the holiday season. The decorations, all made of natural materials, are famous. If you didn't make it this year, take a leaf out of my book, which is Poison to Purge Melancholy by Elena Santangelo. This is the third in a series featuring Pat Montella, a woman from a large Italian family from Philadelphia who moved to Virginia to inherit an old estate, since she is the only remaining member of an old Confederate family. It is in Virginia that she first encounters both history and ghosts.

It is Christmas Eve when our plucky Nancy Drew-like heroine travels to Williamsburg to meet her boyfriend's family for the first time and to spend a few days in one of the colonial houses that were part of the original dwellings present at the time of the Revolutionary War.

As soon as Pat enters the house, she begins getting strange sensations, which she tries to ignore, but this isn't like any haunting she had ever experienced before. Her prior spook sessions had never been frightening; at least she hadn't feared for her personal safety.

The narrative comes from two first-person characters, as the story skids to 1783, then back to the present. One of these is Pat and the other is Ben, a somewhat mysterious man who was in the war and is now making his way in Williamsburg, taking what work he can, as well as entertaining many with his excellent fiddle.

As in Santangelo's previous stories, Pat acts like a conduit from the past to the future. But she is also astute enough to help solve murders that happen around her and she solves past mysterious happening as well.

The background of the story was very entertaining as well, because Pat experiences in her own life certain traditions and customs of the past. Her hostess is an expert at historic recreations, such as the typical festive meals that would have been identical in the hard days of the new republic. There are also a few traditions that only take place in a few areas, like the Firing of Christmas Guns and mummery, which was later outlawed because it is nothing short of robbery by gunpoint. Nowadays, the only mumming is seen at parades, like the Philadelphia New Year's Day parade and at Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

The description of the holiday meal was fascinating, as the modern-day cooks make the dishes with the same ingredients as might have been available 250 years before. Even in times of hardships, the meal included four courses (or removes as they were called, because the diners left the table and relaxed in the parlor for a while) of at least 20 different dishes, all arranged geometrically and according to pattern, because the presentation was as important as the food.

There is a fine balance between the two story lines of the past and the present, and one reason for this is that methods of murder don't seem to change much over the centuries, except that the actual implements have improved over time. This is an enjoyable way to spend some free December hours between those spent creating your own traditions.

Merry Christmas.

Sometimes a Cigar Is Just a Cigar (And Sometimes It's Not)

I don't know about you, but I enjoy reading about Sigmund Freud's theories. His model of the human psyche is fascinating. It involves a purely pleasure-seeking id ("Gamble, mud wrestle, drink, eat, have sex NOW!"); a scolding super-ego that casts morality in black-and-white terms ("What's the matter with you? You must obey every letter of every single rule all of the time!"); and the rational ego, which gamely attempts to strike a workable balance between the impulsive id and the harsh super-ego ("After work, I'll go home and make love to my partner. I'll be passionate but not weird.").

To pay Freud back for the entertainment he's provided me with his ideas, I wish I had the chance to offer him some good book suggestions. I think he'd particularly enjoy Scott Spencer's Man in the Woods, Libby Fischer Hellmann's An Image of Death, and T. R. Pearson's Polar. Characters in these books are right up Freud's alley. They deal with questions about civilization and their ids or super-egos in ways that might make Freud nod, but they could also break your heart.

"It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct." (Sigmund Freud)

When Scott Spencer's Man in the Woods opens, Will Claff is on the run. He left a comfortable life as an accountant in Los Angeles when he lost a $5,000 bet on a basketball game and didn't have the money to pay it off. Someone was going to come looking for him, but just who that was, Will didn't know. The faceless quality of this someone casts him into a sea of paranoia. Soon, everyone seems to be looking for him; everyone's actions are suspect, even those of a dog he stole from a woman who had befriended him in Pennsylvania. It is this dog that Will is abusing in a park near Tarrytown, New York, when a good man named Paul Phillips makes a stop in the park on his way home. To Will, Paul is that faceless man. To Paul, Will is a man who needs to stop beating his dog. In a minute, they are rolling on the ground.

"[Paul] is coldly angry, and even in his anger he mainly wants to put a stop to the whole fight before the man lands another lucky punch. And even as his anger increases--as the numbness in his lips turn to pain, and he wonders if that head butt has cost him a tooth--it is not the kind of anger that is a portal to madness. No. What is taking place is more like a realignment of inner forces, in which the voice of reason grows fainter and the voice of animal instinct becomes more and more dominant, expressing itself in a long, low, gutteral roar. Except for that interior roar, Paul feels strangely calm."

When the fight ends, Will is dead, and a guilt-ridden Paul drives away with the dog in his truck. There is no question of abandoning the dog because it is "his witness, his confessor, he has seen it all and can still sit next to Paul, breathing with him, trusting him, the dog is the reason, the dog is what has been salvaged from the worst moment of Paul's life, the dog is the bridge which Paul walks upon as he inches his way over the abyss, the dog is God spelled backward." Paul will take the dog, now named Shep, home where he lives with his lover Kate Ellis, a recovering alcoholic who has written a best-selling inspirational book, and her 9-year-old daughter, Ruby, who were introduced in Spencer's A Ship Made of Paper.

Man in the Woods is a book of wry and stunning beauty, in which Paul, a carpenter whose work is so fine Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner employed him and a man who has always lived simply and followed his own personal code of honor, now feels set apart from his fellow humans because he killed a man. It's hard to say which Paul would find worse: that his killing remain undetected or be detected. He and Spencer's other memorable characters try to reassure themselves that they function in a rational world. As Detective Jerry Caltagirone says, "I don't accept the idea that things don't make sense. There's something out there, something that says this is okay and this is not okay." In Man in the Woods' waning days of 1999, amid fears of what Y2K will bring, Paul says that the things we think are going to happen, don't usually happen.

What happens in this book would make it an excellent book not only for Freud, but possibly for you, too. It is a psychological and philosophical thriller without the creepiness of a book written by Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine. It provides a chance for contemplating violence; happiness; the relationship between humans and the natural world; faith; fate; responsibility; and love, involving both people and a dog.

"The first requisite of civilization is that of justice." (Sigmund Freud)

To what lengths will a person go to save a relationship with a lover? To bring a criminal to justice? To simply survive? These are questions examined in Libby Fischer Hellmann's An Image of Death. The book begins with a prologue in which a young woman who has lost a tooth is making her way to a house in a bitterly cold Chicago. The landscape is so menacingly empty, so flat, that she wonders if she will take a step and fall off the edge of the world. In a bit, the scene changes to a different part of Chicago, where protagonist/narrator Ellie Foreman, a documentary video producer, receives a mysterious video that appears to show a woman being murdered. She feels compelled to investigate even after delivering the video to the police. This makes a full plate for her, as she's juggling a documentary on foster children; her teenage daughter; and her father, who lives in an assisted living facility nearby. Ellie's lover, who was raised in foster care, is obsessed with a desire for blood ties. Searching for his relatives in Europe is the most important thing in the world to him and, suddenly, his efforts may have produced results that threaten his relationship with Ellie.

While this tale unwinds in the present United States, in alternating chapters the clock turns back in the crumbling Soviet Union. Best friends Arin and Mika try to cope in Georgia as their husbands' military careers evaporate when rubles stop flowing in from Moscow. Months go by, and there is no money. There are no jobs. These brave young Georgians make reluctant compromises with their integrity just to survive. And when this story connects with the one years later in Chicago, it's clear that several murders result from their decisions.

Hellmann's writing is very well done, whether she's relating how the facets in a diamond are cut, creating dialogue, or painting the landscape of Chicago. She is effortlessly entertaining, and she has a gift for making a reader see the world through her characters' eyes, such as Ellie's, below:

"The storm dumped five new inches of snow on the ground, but the streets were clear by ten. So was my driveway, thanks to Fouad, who must have plowed before dawn. I was grateful. I was nursing a wicked hangover; I doubted I could have picked up a shovel. Turning onto Happ Road, I had to shade my eyes. Winter on the North Shore can look like one of those Currier & Ives scenes you see on cookie tin lids. Today, though, the sun shot bursts of light through the trees like artillery fire. Everything was too bright, too intense, too loud."

An Image of Death is the third book in Hellmann's Ellie Forman series. It isn't necessary to read the books featuring this likable protagonist in series order, but An Eye for Murder is first. Georgia Davis, a cop in this book, becomes a private eye in her own series, beginning with Easy Innocence. By the way, we're thrilled to say that our interview with Libby Fischer Hellmann will be published here this Wednesday, November 30.

"Like the physical, the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be." (Sigmund Freud)

While Hellmann's and Spencer's characters grapple mightily with their super-egos, one of T. R. Pearson's characters does no such thing in Polar. Clayton Dupree spends most of his day sitting in a chair with a head-grease stain and ruptured armrests, watching XXX-rated movies on his TV's Satin Channel. When he gets a chance, he likes to tell other people about the movies' plots, and he uses the meeting of his thumb and forefinger along the length of his arm to illustrate the male star's endowment (although one time Clayton "drew both hands apart as if he were describing a trophy carp"). The reader meets Clayton in the grocery checkout line, where he seems his normal self, "phlegmy, unshaven and fragrant in his ordinary fashion, wafting anyway his tangy burly leaf and sweat bouquet with his customary hint of livestock dander and his undertone of Scope." Clayton is in the middle of one of his pornographic descriptions when he suddenly stopped talking and "went exceptional on us." Here's how the nameless narrator, a resident of Virginia's Blue Ridge, describes it:

"That's when it happened. We're most of us in general agreement about that, but we're fairly fractured as to what exactly transpired. There's a school of thought that Clayton fell prey to the bar-code scanner, that the laser somehow bored clean through his pupils to his brain and fused together a couple of pertinent vessels. Among the Merck Manual devotees, spontaneous hemorrhaging is a popular choice, but that Quisenberry has sworn up and down that Clayton never so much as twitched or betrayed in any way that he was suffering some variety of distress. That leaves the considerable faction who subscribe together to the view that Clayton, with all of his vulgar talk and his pornographic pastime, had sorely tried the patience of the Maker who'd seen fit to render him simple, after a fashion, with His wrath."

Whatever the cause, the result is that Clayton lost all interest in pornographic movies. He now asks people to call him Titus, gets out of his chair only to add details with a stick of charcoal to a sting ray-shaped picture on his wall, and issues cryptic little announcements that foretell the future, but in ways that are understood only after the fact. So when Clayton says, "It's Melissa now. Sometimes Missy. Never Angela. Never Denise," a chill shoots straight through the laconic Deputy Sheriff Ray Tatum, who is still searching for Miss Angela Denise Dunn, who was a 3-year-old when she took a walk in the woods three years earlier and disappeared.

One doesn't read T. R. Pearson for the plot. There is a plot, but the joy is in the serial digressions, colloquial prose, and irreverent descriptions of the endearingly eccentric characters who populate Pearson's books of satire set in rural North Carolina and Virginia. This is a book that made me laugh out loud, but some tragic and tragicomic events and a general thread of melancholy tenderness weaving through the narrative make Polar, as well as Pearson's other books, a bittersweet and rewarding read. This is the second book featuring Deputy Ray Tatum. Blue Ridge is the first. After Polar comes Warwolf. I'd also recommend A Short History of a Small Place for readers who'd like to try this neo-Faulknerian writer. Pull up a chair and let Pearson engage your id.

One more id-engaging recommendation: any cookbook by dessert-maven Maida Heatter. Try her Maida Heatter's Best Dessert Book Ever. Heatter writes recipes that any person can conquer. And now, because I can't close without a quotation by Freud involving a man's mother:  "A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror."