Front Porch Books: August 2014 edition

Front Porch Books is a monthly tally of books--mainly advance review copies (aka "uncorrected proofs" and "galleys")--I've received from publishers, but also sprinkled with packages from Book Mooch, Amazon and other sources.  Because my dear friends, Mr. FedEx and Mrs. UPS, leave them with a doorbell-and-dash method of delivery, I call them my Front Porch Books.  In this digital age, ARCs are also beamed to the doorstep of my Kindle via NetGalley and Edelweiss.  Note: most of these books won't be released for another 2-6 months; I'm just here to pique your interest and stock your wish lists. Cover art and opening lines may change before the book is finally released.

The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton (Ecco):  Maybe it’s because I’m just emerging from the depths of Anthony Doerr’s mesmerizing novel All the Light We Cannot See, in which miniature models of two French cities (Paris and Saint-Malo) figure prominently, but ant-scale versions of urban areas fascinate me.  Then again, maybe it’s the notion of being able to hover like God over these small worlds that draws me closer.  Whatever the reason, Jessie Burton’s The Miniaturist makes me want to shrink down and really get inside this novel.   That fantastic cover design goes a long way toward hooking me, too.  Here’s the Jacket Copy:

On a brisk autumn day in 1686, eighteen-year-old Nella Oortman arrives in Amsterdam to begin a new life as the wife of illustrious merchant trader Johannes Brandt. But her new home, while splendorous, is not welcoming. Johannes is kind yet distant, always locked in his study or at his warehouse office—leaving Nella alone with his sister, the sharp-tongued and forbidding Marin. But Nella’s world changes when Johannes presents her with an extraordinary wedding gift: a cabinet-sized replica of their home. To furnish her gift, Nella engages the services of a miniaturist—an elusive and enigmatic artist whose tiny creations mirror their real-life counterparts in eerie and unexpected ways. Johannes’ gift helps Nella to pierce the closed world of the Brandt household. But as she uncovers its unusual secrets, she begins to understand—and fear—the escalating dangers that await them all. In this repressively pious society where gold is worshipped second only to God, to be different is a threat to the moral fabric of society, and not even a man as rich as Johannes is safe. Only one person seems to see the fate that awaits them. Is the miniaturist the key to their salvation...or the architect of their destruction?

Check out these atmospheric Opening Lines:

      The funeral is supposed to be a quiet affair, for the deceased had no friends. But words are water in Amsterdam, they flood your ears and set the rot, and the church’s east corner is crowded. She watches the scene unfold from the safety of the choir stall, as guildsmen and their wives approach the gaping grave like ants toward the honey. Soon, they are joined by VOC clerks and ship’s captains, regentesses, pastry-makers – and him, still wearing that broad-brimmed hat. She tries to pity him. Pity, unlike hate, can be boxed and put away.
      The church’s painted roof – the one thing the reformers didn’t pull down – rises above them like the tipped-up hull of a magnificent ship. It is a mirror to the city’s soul; inked on its ancient beams, Christ in judgement holds his sword and lily, a golden cargo breaks the waves, the Virgin rests on a crescent moon. Flipping up the old misericord beside her, her fingers flutter on the proverb of exposed wood. It is a relief of a man shitting a bag of coins, a leer of pain chipped across his face. What’s changed? she thinks.
      And yet.
      Even the dead are in attendance today, grave-slabs hiding body on body, bones on dust, stacked up beneath the mourners’ feet. Below that floor are women’s jaws, a merchant’s pelvis, the hollow ribs of a fat grandee. There are little corpses down there, some no longer than a loaf of bread. Noting how people shift their eyes from such condensed sadness, how they move from any tiny slab they see, she cannot blame them.

I Love You More by Jennifer Murphy (Doubleday):  Novels narrated by precocious young girls are as old as mockingbirds, but Jennifer Murphy’s debut somehow feels fresh right from the Opening Lines:

      The rumors started before my daddy’s body got cold. I’d made my peace with the lies by then—lies I’ve learned are a necessary evil—and, being from the South, I’m used to cloying (that means sickeningly sweet) smiles, but I hadn’t figured on the sideways glances, hushed talk, loud silence. Feigned ignorance. I mean someone’s dying had always made the front page of the Hollyville Herald. Even Mrs. Morgan’s twenty-year-old cat got a paragraph, but not my daddy. The particulars of Oliver Lane’s funeral were tucked in the ad section between an upcoming gun show, an irony I’m sure was lost on the editor, and a JESUS LOVES YOU, standard filler for slow news days. Thankfully there was no mention of murder, or of the fact that the police suspected Mama or one of those other two ladies. It wouldn’t be polite to put such things in writing.
      My name is Picasso, like the artist. Mama said she named me Picasso because he painted about truth, but I think Mama misinterpreted his words. What Pablo Picasso said was this: Art is a lie that makes us realize truth. What I think he meant is that great art is born from skillful lying, and something else, something much more profound, that lying is okay as long as its end goal is altruistic. Well that’s how I read it anyway, and that’s how I’ve been able to justify what happened that day.

“What happened that day” is at the heart of I Love You More, one of the more intriguing books to land on my front porch this month.  Here’s the Jacket Copy:

One man, three wives, the perfect murder. A scintillating novel of betrayal and conspiracy. Picasso Lane is twelve years old when her father, Oliver, is murdered at their summer beach house. Her mother, Diana, is the primary suspect—until the police discover his second wife, and then his third. The women say they have never met—but Picasso knows otherwise. Picasso remembers the morning beautiful Jewels showed up at their house, carrying the same purse as her mother, and a family portrait featuring her father with two strange boys. Picasso remembers lifting the phone, listening to late night calls with Bert, a woman heavily pregnant with Oliver's fourth child. As the police circle and a detective named Kyle Kennedy becomes a regular fixture in their home, Picasso tries to make sense of her father's death, the depth of his deceit, and the secrets that bind these three women. Cunningly paced and plotted, I Love You More is a riveting novel of misplaced loyalty, jealousy, and revenge.

Blurbworthiness:  “When I really, truly love a book, I feel a kind of deep excitement-envy-admiration that verges on awe.  My requirements: the story must make me forget everything but it, and the writing must be lean, evocative, and powerful.  I Love You More is all of these things.  I really, truly love it so much that I wish I’d written it myself.  In its pages, Jennifer Murphy deftly balances light and dark, humanity and heartlessness, love and murder, and creates characters so well drawn you feel as if you know them, as well as a mystery so compelling you can barely look away from the page.”  (Jennifer Niven, author of American Blonde)

Ordinary Sins by Jim Heynen (Milkweed Editions):  My advance copy of Jim Heynen’s story collection is a thin book—no thicker than saltine cracker, really—but it is fat with characters.  We meet these people in 47 stories spread across 96 pages.  You do the math.  At that rate, Heynen better be a pretty damned good writer to put flesh on the bones of one character before moving on to the next.  From what little I’ve sampled from the book, I’d say he succeeds more than he fails.  Several of the titles begin with “Who,” a silent “The Man” or “The Woman” preceding it: “Who Jingled His Change,” “Who Loved Her Dog,” “Who Didn’t Like to Have People Watch Him Eat,” “Who Talked to His Bees,” etc. We also meet “The Hoarder,” “The Hardware Store Man,” “The Checkout Clerk,” “The Couple That Never Fought,” and “The Lepidopterist,” whose Opening Lines are:

He had an eye for the detailed web in the clearwings and for the colors in the brimstones and sulphurs. He admired the excited movement in the flashers and skippers, and savored the sweet diversity of the fritillaries, the leafwings, and the metalmarks.

I also like the way the short-short story “The Chapstick Guy” opens:

For some reason this man wore so much chapstick on his lips that if he fell on his face he’d leave a skid mark like a slug. Nobody ever commented about it, even though his lips slid around so much when he talked that you’d think he was trying to invent a new language for romance.

There, I’ve already given you half of this piece of flash fiction.  You’ll need to buy the book to find out what happens to The Chapstick Guy.  Along with fresh, inventive fiction, Ordinary Sins features drawings by Tom Pohrt.  Blurbworthiness:  “Ordinary Sins gives you people-watching in book form.  Each eccentric in this pantheon is a magnet for your gaze, their excesses fascinating, exasperating, bizarre—then suddenly familiar.  ‘Hey, I have relatives like these characters!’  And eventually you will see yourself, recognize your quirks, and thanks to Jim Heynen’s portraits of us all, you may forgive yourself.  Why be human if you can’t be odd in your own glorious way?  This is a book to revel in.”  (Kim Stafford, author of The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft)

Keep Your Friends Close by Paula Daly (Grove):  Fans of Paula Daly’s debut novel What Kind of a Mother Are You? will definitely want to get in line for this new book, a tense marital thriller that has shades of Diabolique and Single White Female.  Here’s the Jacket Copy, which is sure to unnerve even the happiest of marriages:

Natty and Sean Wainwright have a rock-solid marriage—with two teenage daughters, a successful hotel business, and a beautiful house, they are a model family. When their younger daughter falls gravely ill on a school trip to France, Natty rushes to her side. Luckily, Natty’s best friend from college, Eve Dalladay, is visiting and offers to stay with Sean to lend a hand in the Wainwright household. But Natty returns home to find that Eve has taken to family life a little too well: Sean has fallen in love with her. With no choice but to put on a brave face for the children, Natty attempts to start anew—yet no matter how hard she tries to set herself upright, Eve is there to knock her down again. Then Natty receives a mysterious note that says Eve has done this before—more than once—and the consequences were fatal. On a mission to reveal Eve as a vindictive serial mistress, Natty must navigate through a treacherous maze of secrets and lies that threatens her life and the safety of her loved ones.

Are you nervously twisting your wedding band around your ring finger yet?  Here’s some Blurbworthiness to seal the deal:  “The suspense, dread and paranoia intensify with each page.  Paula Daly explores what happens when a serpent invades the family nest, twisting truth into lies and illuminating our deepest fears.  A novel that explores the power of family, love and betrayal, and what lengths we will go to keep our loved ones safe.”  (Denise Hamilton, author of Damage Control)

The Children Act by Ian McEwan (Nan A. Talese):  There are some authors whose new novels I will buy before the last syllable of their name leaves a bookseller’s lips: Richard Ford, John Irving, Alice McDermott, Benjamin Percy, and Shari Holman, to name just a few.  Add Ian McEwan to the list.  Starting with Atonement, I have been a die-hard fan.  So, it was with heart-flutters of joy that I received his newest release, The Children Act, which is due out next month.  Turning to the Opening Lines, I was struck by the Dickensian Bleak House homage:

London. Trinity term one week old. Implacable June weather. Fiona Maye, a High Court judge, at home on Sunday evening, supine on a chaise lounge, staring past her stockinged feet toward the end of the room, toward a partial view of recessed bookshelves by the fireplace and, to one side, by a tall window, a tiny Renoir lithograph of a bather, bought by her thirty years ago for fifty pounds. Probably a fake. Below it, centered on a round walnut table, a blue vase. No memory of how she came by it. Nor when she last put flowers in it. The fireplace not lit in a year. Blackened raindrops falling irregularly into the grate with a ticking sound against balled-up yellowing newsprint. A Bokhara rug spread on wide polished floorboards. Looming at the edge of vision, a baby grand piano bearing silver-framed family photos on its deep black shine. On the floor by the chaise lounge, within her reach, the draft of a judgment. And Fiona was on her back, wishing all this stuff at the bottom of the sea.

I don’t know about you, but I can really feel that room and hear those raindrops.  Here’s the Jacket Copy to convince the unconvinced:

Fiona Maye is a leading High Court judge who presides over cases in the family court. She is renowned for her fierce intelligence, exactitude, and sensitivity. But her professional success belies private sorrow and domestic strife. There is the lingering regret of her childlessness, and now her marriage of thirty years is in crisis. At the same time, she is called on to try an urgent case: Adam, a beautiful seventeen-year-old boy, is refusing for religious reasons the medical treatment that could save his life, and his devout parents echo his wishes. Time is running out. Should the secular court overrule sincerely expressed faith? In the course of reaching a decision, Fiona visits Adam in the hospital—and encounter that stirs long-buried feelings in her and powerful new emotions in the boy. Her judgment has momentous consequences for them both.

See How Small by Scott Blackwood (Little, Brown):  Judging by its Opening Lines, I suspect See How Small is going to be an emotionally-rough book to read:

      We have always lived here, though we pretend we’ve just arrived. That’s the trick, to make forgetful shapes with your mouth so everything feels new and unremembered. But after a while we slip up. A careless word, an uninvited smell, a tip of the tongue taste of something sweet, makes the room suddenly familiar—and we have to begin again. Like startled infants, we look to your face to tell us what comes next. You came into the fire.
      Take off your clothes, the men with guns said.
      Please, we said.
      Now, they said.
      Please let us go, we said. We won’t tell anyone.
      Not anyone? They smiled with their guns.
      Not anyone, we said. Please.
      Our jeans and boots and jackets and shirts were piled high in the middle of the floor, like a breaking wave.
      The tile was cold under our feet.
      Across the room, the stainless steel ice cream case gleamed. On the floor beside it, the cash register drawer sprawled on its side.

The narrators of that first chapter are three teenage girls who (no spoiler here) are murdered in a rather brutal fashion.  Though you might think this is a novel told by ghosts (a la The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold or The Night Country by Stewart O’Nan), Blackwood soon moves his narrative, like a roving camera, to other members of the small town so we get a chorus of voices filling us in on what happened in that ice cream parlor.  Hard as it may be, I really can’t wait to read this heartbreaking novel.  Blurbworthiness:  “Horrible deaths of the innocent, and the various means and tactics by which the living manage to go on in the aftermath of unsolved horror, form the heart of Scott Blackwood’s haunted and haunting novel, See How Small.  His prose is crisp and his narrative approach is fresh and inventive, calmly pushing forward, with characters rendered so convincingly you think about sending cards of condolence or calling with advice on the investigation.”  (Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter’s Bone and The Maid’s Version)

Arctic Summer by Damon Galgut (Europa Editions):  Europa’s cover design for Damon Galgut’s third novel could be a frame from a Merchant-Ivory film.  That wouldn’t be too far off, actually, since Arctic Summer is a fictionalized biography of E. M. Forster whose novels A Room With a View, Maurice and Howards End Ismail Merchant and James Ivory put before the camera.  I don’t know much about Forster (haven’t read his books, though I’ve seen some of the movie versions), so I’m especially interested to read Galgut’s treatment of his life.  Here’s the Jacket Copy:

Damon Galgut's third novel, a fictionalized biography of English author E. M. Forster, focuses on Forster's many years in India and the process of writing his masterpiece, A Passage to India. This compact, finely wrought novel also addresses Forster's unforgiving childhood in England and the homosexuality he feared and repressed throughout his life. Psychologically acute without being sentimental, Forster's relationships are described with compassion and great care. Galgut is a master at constructing strange, compelling landscapes, and Arctic Summer shifts seamlessly between staid, restricting England and Cairo and vibrant, pleasantly, absurd India. Moments of gentle humor shine through the sparse prose, lending Forster a humanity that makes his story all the more heartbreaking.

Even the Opening Lines have a formality that seems to be in line with something Forster himself would write:

In October of 1912, the SS City of Birmingham was travelling through the Red Sea, midway on her journey to India, when two men found themselves together on the forward deck. Each had come there separately, hoping to escape a concert that some of the other passengers were organising, but they were slightly acquainted by now and not unhappy to have company. It was the middle of the afternoon. They were sitting in a spot that offered sun and shade, as well as seclusion from the wind. Both carried books with them, which they politely set aside when they began to speak.

Blurbworthiness:  “In describing these adventures and encounters, as well as meetings with Edward Carpenter and others, Galgut has so seamlessly incorporated Forster’s diaries, letters and novels into his narrative that it is often hard to tell which novelist is which.”  (The Telegraph)

If Not For This by Pete Fromm (Red Hen Press):  Just as I will stand in a long, out-the-door-and-around-the-corner line to buy a new Ian McEwan novel, any time a fresh Fromm hits the bookstore shelves, I’m there.  In this case, I happened to be at Country Bookshelf in Bozeman, Montana for a reading by fellow Big Sky novelist Malcolm Brooks when I spied the woman on the cover of If Not For This floating past me.  Snatch and grab.  This new novel, set partially in my home state of Wyoming, looks especially good.  Exhibit A: the Jacket Copy:

After meeting at a boatman’s bash on the Snake River, river runners Maddy and Dalt embark on a lifelong love affair. They marry on the banks of the Buffalo Fork, sure they’ll live there the rest of their days. Forced by the economics of tourism to leave Wyoming, they start a new adventure, opening their own river business in Ashland, Oregon: Halfmoon Whitewater. They prosper there, leading rafting trips and guiding fishermen into the wilds of Mongolia and Russia. But when Maddy, laid low by dizzy spells, with a mono that isn’t quite mono, both discovers she is pregnant and is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, they realize their adventure is just beginning. Navigating hazards that dwarf any of the rapids they’ve faced together, Maddy narrates her life with Dalt the way she lives it: undaunted, courageous, in the present tense. Driven by her irresistible voice, full of wit and humor and defiance, If Not For This is a love story like no other.

Blurbworthiness:  “What do you do when you get everything you most desire in this life, but getting through every day requires you to be a superhero?  In Pete Fromm’s smart, gorgeous, uplifting and heartbreaking new novel, If Not For This, you consider yourself damn lucky.”  (Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of Once Upon a River)

The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit by Graham Joyce (Doubleday):  Another novel I picked up on that same Country Bookshelf visit (CB really knows how to curate books to my taste) was this new one by British writer Graham Joyce.  I’ve mentioned his earlier end-of-the-world tale, The Silent Land, earlier here at The Quivering Pen, so this was an easy sell to me.  The Ghost in the Electric Blue Suit looks like it might make for some great late-summer beach reading (if only I had a beach here in Montana….).  Check out the Opening Lines:

      It was 1976 and the hottest summer in living memory. The reservoirs were cracked and dry; some of the towns were restricted to water from standpipes; crops were failing in the fields. England was a country innocent of all such extremity. I was nineteen and had just finished my first year at college.
      Broke and with time on my hands, I needed a summer job. Looking for a way out from the plans my stepdad had made for me, I got an interview at a holiday resort on the east coast. Skegness, celebrated for that jolly fisherman in gum boots and a sou’wester gamely making headway against a sea- ward gale: It’s so bracing!
      But when I arrived in Skegness there wasn’t a breath of wind, not even a sigh. The train rumbled in on hot iron tracks, decanted me and a few others onto the platform, and wheezed out again. The dirty Victorian red brick of the station seemed brittle, powdery. Flowers potted along the platform wilted and the grubby paintwork was cracked and peeled. I took a double-decker bus—mercifully open-topped—and asked the driver to drop me at the resort. He forgot and had to stop the bus and come up the stairs to tell me he’d passed it by. I had to backpack it a quarter of a mile, all in the shimmering heat. I followed the wire-mesh perimeter of the site with its neat rows of chalets and the seagull-like cries of the holidaymakers.
      I thought I might get a job as a kitchen porter or as a white-jacketed waiter bowling soup plates at the holidaymakers. Any job at all, just so long as I didn’t have to go home. The manager in charge of recruitment—a dapper figure in a blue blazer and sporting a tiny pencil mustache—didn’t seem too interested. He was preoccupied with sprinkling bread crumbs on the corner of his desk. As I waited to be interviewed a sparrow fluttered in through the open window, picked up a crumb in its beak, and flew out again.

And here’s the Jacket Copy (complete with a plague of ladybugs!) to further entice us, like birds to crumbs:

David, a college student, takes a summer job at a run-down family resort in a dying English resort town. This is against the wishes of his family... because it was at this resort where David's biological father disappeared fifteen years earlier. But something undeniable has called David there. A deeper otherworldliness lies beneath the surface of what we see. The characters have a suspicious edge to them. David is haunted by eerie visions of a mysterious man carrying a rope, walking hand-in-hand with a small child...and the resort is under siege by a plague of ladybugs. Something different is happening in this town. When David gets embroiled in a fiercely torrid love triangle, the stakes turn more and more menacing. And through it all, David feels as though he is getting closer to the secrets of his own past. This is a darkly magic and sexy book that has a strong suspense line running through it. It's destined to continue to pull in a wider circle of readers for the exceptionally talented Graham Joyce.

Barracuda by Christos Tsiolkas (Hogarth):  This new novel by the author of The Slap had me in its grip right from the Opening Lines—words which immediately shot this 433-page book to the top layers of my To-Be-Read pile:

      When the rain first spills from those egg-white foams of cloud that seem too delicate to have burst forth in such a deluge, I freeze. The heavy drops fizz on the dry grass as they hit; I think this is what a pit of snakes would sound like.
      And suddenly the rain is falling in sheets, though the sky is still blue, the sun still shining. The Glaswegians on the pebbled shore are yelling and screaming, rushing out of the water, huddling under the trees, running back to their cars. Except for the chubby young man with the St Andrews tattoo on his bicep, criss-crossed white lines on blue; he is standing in the water up to his knees, grinning, his arms outstretched, welcoming the rain, daring it.
      And just as suddenly the rain has stopped and they all slink back to the beach. Two young boys race past me and throw themselves into the lake. A teenage girl throws away the magazine she has been sheltering beneath, takes out a compact and starts to powder her cheeks and nose, to reapply colour to her lips till they are the pink of fairy floss. Someone has turned the music back on and the words when love takes over roar through the valley. A pale skinny youth with broken teeth and a mop of greasy black hair dives past me; sheets of crystal-clear water splash all over the wading tattooed guy, who grabs his friend, holds him from behind in a bear hug, and ducks him under. He sits on him, laughing. A woman shouts from the shore, "Get off him, Colm, get off him!"
      The chubby guy stands up, grinning, and the thin boy scrambles to his feet, coughing water.
      The girls and the women are all in bikinis, the boys and the men are all in shorts, and bare-chested or in singlets. Except me: I have jeans on and two layers on top, a t-shirt and an old yellowing shirt. The sun feels weak to me; it can’t get any stronger than pleasant, it can’t build to fire, it can’t manage force.

The narrator is Danny, a troubled competitive swimmer who—well, here, let’s let the Jacket Copy explain the plot of Barracuda:

Fourteen-year-old Daniel Kelly is special. Despite his upbringing in working-class Melbourne, he knows that his astonishing ability in the swimming pool has the potential to transform his life, silence the rich boys at the private school to which he has won a sports scholarship, and take him far beyond his neighborhood, possibly to international stardom and an Olympic medal. Everything Danny has ever done, every sacrifice his family has ever made, has been in pursuit of this dream. But what happens when the talent that makes you special fails you? When the goal that you’ve been pursuing for as long as you can remember ends in humiliation and loss? Twenty years later, Dan is in Scotland, terrified to tell his partner about his past, afraid that revealing what he has done will make him unlovable. When he is called upon to return home to his family, the moment of violence in the wake of his defeat that changed his life forever comes back to him in terrifying detail, and he struggles to believe that he’ll be able to make amends. Haunted by shame, Dan relives the intervening years he spent in prison, where the optimism of his childhood was completely foreign. Tender, savage, and blazingly brilliant, Barracuda is a novel about dreams and disillusionment, friendship and family, class, identity, and the cost of success. As Daniel loses everything, he learns what it means to be a good person—and what it takes to become one.

I hate to leave you with an unforgivable pun….but, really, I can’t wait to dive into this novel.

Friday Freebie: Witches on the Road Tonight by Sheri Holman

Congratulations to Melissa Kramer, winner of last week's Friday Freebie: Spring by David Szalay.

This week's book giveaway is a novel which regular readers of The Quivering Pen have heard me trumpet once or twice in the past year: Witches on the Road Tonight by Sheri Holman.  As I wrote at the beginning of my earlier review:

Sheri Holman’s fourth novel, Witches on the Road Tonight, begins at the end of Eddie Alley’s life as the has-been host of a campy TV horror show writes what appears to be a suicide letter to his grown daughter Wallis. In this opening paragraph of Holman’s book, we find a good illustration of how the author of The Dress Lodger and The Mammoth Cheese uses detail to bring her sentences to life:

Of all the props I saved, only the coffin remains. Packed in boxes or tossed in the closet were the skulls and rubber rats, the cape folded with the care of a fallen American flag, my black spandex unitard, white at the seams where I’d stretched out the armpits, sweat-stained and pilled. I saved the squeezed-out tubes of greasepaint, the black shadow for under the eyes, the porcelain fangs. Of the gifts fans sent, I kept that bleached arc of a cat’s skeleton, the one you used to call Fluffy and hang your necklaces from, and a dead bird preserved with antifreeze. I kept maybe a hundred of the many thousands of drawings and letters from preteen boys and girls. There were some from adults, too, confessions of the sort they should be writing their shrinks or the police, and not a man who plays a vampire on TV. “Dear Captain Casket, Fangs for the memories.”

Just as The Mammoth Cheese embraced everything from dairy farming to Jeffersonian politics, Witches on the Road Tonight is a novel which takes a wide-angle view of mid-century American life. Holman touches on matriarchy, Appalachian witchcraft, silent movies, FDR’s Works Project Administration programs, homosexuality, traumatic childhoods, and the fleeting nature of fame—but especially the latter.  Imagine Captain Kangaroo in a blue funk after the television studio cameras have blinked off for the last time and you’ll have some sense of the malaise which settles over Eddie Alley after he’s hung up his Captain Casket cape.  Witches on the Road roams across the 70-year timeline of Eddie’s life, from his childhood in Panther Gap, Virginia to his campy popularity in small-market television in the 1960s to the twilight of his life in a Manhattan penthouse at midnight.

But don't just take my word for it.  Here's what The Washington Post had to say about the novel: "[Witches on the Road Tonight takes readers] deep into the secretive silence and sublime vistas of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a setting which Holman splendidly evokes in all its eerie beauty....She is as eloquent about the physical landscape of her stories as she is about the internal terrain of human emotion.... Seductive and hallucinatory....Witches on the Road Tonight is less about monsters and witches than it is about people whose fears and failings are profoundly and recognizably human."

I have a new paperback copy of Witches to give away to one lucky blog reader.  For your chance at winning it, all you have to do is answer this question:

What is the name of Holman's first novel, published in 1997?  (You can visit her website to find the answer--or, if you're a fan like me, you'll know it off the top of your head.)

Email your answer to thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line.  One entry per person, please.  Please e-mail me the answer, rather than posting it in the comments section.  Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on Jan. 12--at which time I'll draw the winning name.  I'll announce the lucky reader on Jan. 13.  If you'd like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week Quivering Pen newsletter, simply add the words "Sign me up for the newsletter" in the body of your email.  Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party.

Want to double your odds of winning?  Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter.  Once you've done either or both of those, send me an additional e-mail saying "I've shared" and I'll put your name in the hat twice.

My Year of Reading: Favorite Covers of 2011

The best book cover designs set the mood before we even reach the first page.  Take The Psychopath Test for instance:

The hard slashing tear, the neon pink, the halves of the two animals, the pursuer and the pursued--I'm already feeling the bile of anxiety rising in my throat just passing this schizophrenic cover on the bookstore's New Arrivals table.

Good jacket designs draw me in with their colors (looking at this year's favorites, I see blues and greens are predominant), simplicity, and humor.  I like the odd, the off-kilter, the quirky.  I also like the symbolic: effective covers tell me what to expect inside through their use of illustrations or photos which carry weighted meaning (those two chairs on Lily Tuck's I Married You For Happiness, for instance).

But, really, the best covers are the ones which do what they're intended to do: persuade me to buy the book, no matter if I'm inclined to like the contents or not.  Dust jackets are carnival barkers--they convince me to step inside the tent flap; it's up to the author to keep me there, enthralled in front of the Bearded Siamese Mermaid Twins.

Here are the covers which particularly tickled my fancy this year:

The Leftovers by Tom Perotta (Rob Grom, cover designer): Those wisps of smoke curling up from a just-emptied pair of shoes say everything you need to know about Perotta's satire about The Rapture.

Lime Creek by Joe Henry: At first glance, I like the colors at work here.  Closer inspection reveals a tiny human figure against this cold, beautiful Wyoming landscape.  Henry's prose style is spare and lyrical; I think the cover bottles that mood perfectly.

Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin (Tal Goretsky, cover designer): There's nothing new about this photo of Dickens--it's one die-hard fans like me have engraved on the backs of our eyelids--but I like the muted aquas and browns which give it a vintage feel while highlighting that look-ahead expression on the Great One's face.

Trapped by Michael Northrop (Phil Falco, cover designer):  This YA novel about a group of students snowbound in their school during a freak storm is marketed as "The Breakfast Club meets The Shining."  I get frostbite just from looking at this cover.  Unfortunately, I have this one on my Kindle so I can't lust for the cover in person.

The Hangman's Daughter by Oliver Potzsch (Ben Gibson, cover designer):  There's an excellent use of font and Edward Gorey-style illustration at work here.  Plus, I love the book's French flaps and deckle-edged pages.  And, honestly, who can resist that girl's dangling legs?

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carre (Paul Buckley and Gregg Kulick, cover designers):  I've mentioned Penguin's le Carre re-issues before, but I thought I'd trot this one out again.  Those blank spectacles really stand out in the crowd, don't they?

This Vacant Paradise by Victoria Patterson (Gabriel Mason, cover designer):  Here's another excellent use of shapely legs, this time startlingly sexy...and yet a little scary, too.  There is mystery and danger lurking in that dark cleft beneath the short-short skirt.

Crimes in Southern Indiana by Frank Bill (Rodrigo Corral, cover designer):  The rusting, shot-up carcass of a car and the graffiti font are perfect indicators of the decadence found in Bill's whiskey-soaked noir stories about characters who more than likely have yards full of cars like this.

I Married You for Happiness by Lily Tuck (Chip Kidd, cover designer):  As I mentioned before, these two chairs, angled away from each other, speak volumes about the sad end of a marriage which is at the heart of Tuck's novel.  I also like how the white bands draw attention to the photo.  This design wouldn't have been as effective if the photo had bled all the way to the edges of the jacket.

The Night Strangers by Chris Bohjalian:  Bohjalian's ghost story is about what lurks behind an airline pilot's basement door, which is sealed shut with thirty-nine bolts.  On the cover, the door is ajar and we're pulled into the scary green light beyond.

The Glitter Scene by Monika Fagerholm (Gray318, cover designer): I haven't had the chance to read Fagerholm's novel, so I don't know how closely the cover reflects the contents (the story revolves around a lonely girl in Finland unraveling dark family secrets), but I suspect the novel is as jarring and unsettling as the off-kilter cover.

The Call by Yannick Murphy (Milan Bozic, cover designer): Murphy's novel is a series of journal entries about a rural New England veterinarian making his daily calls.  Rather than crowding the cover with a barnyard of James Herriot-ish animals, the publisher went with one simple cow--a smart choice.  I also like how the cow is intertwined with the "C" of the title.

A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion by Ron Hansen (Gabriele Wilson, cover designer): This gets my vote for sexiest cover of the year.  There's something about that negligee strap slipping off the girl's shoulder which drives me wild--okay, yes, with a wild surge of guilty passion.  We can't see her eyes, but I suspect she's looking with lust at that Jazz Age nightscape.

Maine by J. Courtney Sullivan (Abby Weintraub, cover designer):  What I love: the dominant greenish sky; the bold lettering of the font which is almost like skywriting; the multiple geometric angles of the horizon, the white sand, the forearm, the wrist, the legs; and--most of all--the fact that the sunbather is looking away from the camera.  There's a casual tension hard at work here.

Trophy by Michael Griffith (Adnauseum, cover designer):  The entirety of Griffith's Kafka-esque novel is about a single moment in a man's life--the instant of his death as he's crushed beneath a huge taxidermied bear.  I like to think the fuzzy-focus photo of the bruin on the cover is the last image burned on his brain for the 224 pages of the book.

Cabin by Lou Ureneck:  The only place you'll find snow this blue is on a Hawaiian Shaved Ice snow-cone, but it works well here, drawing me into the memoir of how Ureneck and his brother built a cabin in the Maine woods.  The light-blaze from the windows is the perfect color contrast on this evocative cover.

The Last Werewolf by Glen Duncan (Peter Mendelsund, cover designer):  The stark simplicity of the cover design is perfect for this novel in which the main character--a 200-year-old werewolf--lives his life according to the phases of the moon.

Johnny Appleseed by Howard Means (Tom McKeveny, cover designer):  The titular folklore legend--as we learned courtesy of schoolbooks and that Disney cartoon--was a man on the move, planting trees throughout Eastern states in the early 19th century.  I love the off-the-jacket movement of the design on Howard Means' biography.  Johnny can't sit still; he's got seeds to scatter.

Touch by Alexi Zentner (Chin-Yee Lai, cover designer):  I guess I'm a sucker for snowy covers (see Trapped, Cabin, et al).  On this cover, it's the pipe-straight lines of the trees which also catch my eye.  As I mentioned previously, I also heart the other cover designs for Touch from the UK and Canada.

The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands by Nick Flynn (Scott Sorenson, cover designer):  On this jacket, it's the odd, startling illustration which does the trick for me.  Who wouldn't want to read Flynn's poems after seeing this disturbing bird-man on the cover?

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt (Dan Stiles, cover designer):  Like one of those "Magic Eye" posters, this is a cover with several layers which revealed themselves to me over time.  What at first looks like two gunmen aiming pistols at me against the backdrop of an enormous moon gradually turned into a skull.  And I may be wrong, but isn't that Ben Franklin from a C-note in the background?  I love it when illustrations work on several different levels like this.

Witches on the Road Tonight by Sheri Holman (Charles Rue Woods, cover designer):  This is the Jacket Redesign Success Story of the Year.  The Advance Reading Copy (sent to reviewers like me) for Holman's novel about Appalachian backwoods sorcery during the Depression was, I'm sorry to report, pretty awful.  You can see it here at this earlier blog post.  When I finally received the finished hardcover version of the novel, I was overjoyed to find it had been replaced by a gorgeous woodcut illustration of a woman lying with a panther (a key element of the story).  The startling blue against the midnight-soaked landscape practically makes the book glow in the reader's hands.  This might just be my favorite cover of the year.

The Creature in the Cauldron: Sheri Holman's Witches on the Road Tonight

Sheri Holman’s fourth novel, Witches on the Road Tonight, begins at the end of Eddie Alley’s life as the has-been host of a campy TV horror show writes what appears to be a suicide letter to his grown daughter Wallis.  In this opening paragraph of Holman’s book, we find a good illustration of how the author of The Dress Lodger and The Mammoth Cheese uses detail to bring her sentences to life:

Of all the props I saved, only the coffin remains. Packed in boxes or tossed in the closet were the skulls and rubber rats, the cape folded with the care of a fallen American flag, my black spandex unitard, white at the seams where I’d stretched out the armpits, sweat-stained and pilled. I saved the squeezed-out tubes of greasepaint, the black shadow for under the eyes, the porcelain fangs. Of the gifts fans sent, I kept that bleached arc of a cat’s skeleton, the one you used to call Fluffy and hang your necklaces from, and a dead bird preserved with antifreeze. I kept maybe a hundred of the many thousands of drawings and letters from preteen boys and girls. There were some from adults, too, confessions of the sort they should be writing their shrinks or the police, and not a man who plays a vampire on TV. “Dear Captain Casket, Fangs for the memories.”

Just as The Mammoth Cheese embraced everything from dairy farming to Jeffersonian politics, Witches on the Road Tonight is a novel which takes a wide-angle view of mid-century American life.  Holman touches on matriarchy, Appalachian witchcraft, silent movies, FDR’s Works Project Administration programs, homosexuality, traumatic childhoods, and the fleeting nature of fame—but especially the latter.  Imagine Captain Kangaroo in a blue funk after the television studio cameras have blinked off for the last time and you’ll have some sense of the malaise which settles over Eddie Alley after he’s hung up his Captain Casket cape.

Witches on the Road roams across the 70-year timeline of Eddie’s life, from his childhood in Panther Gap, Virginia to his campy popularity in small-market television in the 1960s to the twilight of his life in a Manhattan penthouse at midnight.  While Holman is good at capturing the spirit of each era, the one which crackles to life most vividly is the 1940s section, which opens with a WPA writer and photographer--Tucker Hayes and his lover Sonia--driving through the Blue Ridge region on a government project to document rural American life.  In a moment of distraction, they hit eight-year-old Eddie when he runs into the road.  They take the boy home to the ramshackle cabin he shares with his mother, a woman who has, to Eddie’s embarrassment, earned a local reputation as a sorceress:

He hears the boys and girls whisper. When Cora Alley is mad, milk sours in the pail. Storms blow in from the east. And they don’t even know what Eddie knows. The men she keeps buried in the woods. Or how she slips out of her skin from time to time, leaving it hanging on a peg in her bedroom while she disappears through the keyhole. Still, is it proof enough? A boy never wants to believe ill of his own mother.

Holman never comes out and says Eddie’s mother is a shape-shifter, but there is one jaw-dropping scene where Tucker, who stays the night at the cabin with Sonia, imagines he’s ridden through the woods by a very naked Cora—“a vision of blood and sinew, standing raw against the moon.”  He hears his feet on the forest path and they sound like hooves.  The ride is sexual and terrifying and, for the reader, completely enthralling.

Holman never quite matches that mystical fever pitch in the rest of the book and I found myself wishing there was more cavorting by moonlight and less of a long subplot involving a homeless teenage boy named Jasper who works at Eddie’s TV station and worms his way into the family, a move which twelve-year-old Wallis finds both repulsive and thrilling.  The Jasper sections are important to the outcome of Eddie’s life, but they don't vibrate with as much visceral narration as the chapters set in the 1940s.

One of Holman’s greatest strengths is her ability to transport readers back to other eras through the carefully-placed details she slips onto the page.  For instance, take this paragraph where Sonia, the WPA photographer is wandering through Eddie’s Appalachian home, clicking her documentary shutter at all she sees:

On her dresser, Mrs. Alley has grouped her personal possessions so as to hide old water rings on the dark wood. A butterscotch Bakelite vessel for loose powder and a furry, store-bought puff for applying it. A man’s comb with a spine of white, compressed dandruff. Her leather-bound Bible with gilt edging, bloated from humid weather. A chipped bubble-ware dish holding four black bobby pins and a long curling hair.

In these flashbacks which dot the novel, Holman turns every page into a Dorothea Lange photograph.

The early scenes of the novel are the most crucial (and the most satisfying to read) because they document the turning point in Eddie’s life when, at eight years old, he sees Thomas Edison’s Frankenstein for the first time.  By way of apology to the boy he’s injured, Tucker fetches his hand-cranked movie projector from his car, promising him a special treat.  There, on the rough chestnut planks of Eddie’s bedroom wall, the two of them watch the flickering images of the 1910 film.  “The first horror movie ever made,” Tucker tells him.

Rising from the cauldron is a hint of creature. As Eddie watches, charred flesh attracts more charred flesh, it’s like his daddy at butchering time, tossing chops and ribs into a pail, rebuilding a hog in section slices. Suddenly an arm jerks up in salute and a misshapen head appears through the fog.

Edison’s Frankenstein will haunt and obsess Eddie for the rest of his days.  He becomes a flamboyant provocateur of the macabre, an Ahab always on the harpoon-hunt for Death, a guilt-dogged man with as many failures as triumphs.  In the end, Eddie believes he’s just another misshapen creature rising from the cauldron.

Horror has permeated Eddie’s entire life.  Having a witch for a mother will do that to a kid, I suppose.  Years after he leaves Panther Gap, Eddie reveals little to his wife and daughter of his upbringing by a woman who allegedly took off her skin at night and rode men like horses.  When a teenage Wallis asks him to describe the grandmother she never knew, Eddie replies: “She believed in telling ghost stories at bedtime.  I never knew until I met your mother that parents were supposed to comfort their children to sleep.  I thought they were supposed to scare them into staying in bed.”

Cora is also the kind of mother who gives her young son advice that’s as mystical as it is inscrutable for someone at that age:

Eddie, you will meet people who mean something and you know there is meaning but you don’t know yet whether they are your ruin or salvation and they go underground and live inside you until they reappear maybe years, maybe decades later, but by then you have grown so much of your own skin around them, layer upon layer, you don’t even recognize them anymore, and that’s how you become your own ruin or salvation, that’s the power of not knowing what’s growing inside you, what you’ve lost for so long.

It’s moonshine wisdom Eddie will carry for years, whether he understands it or not.  He grows to be an unsettled man, a vampire who belongs to neither this world nor the next, a person who wrestles against a longing he cannot name.  And that, Holman seems to be saying, is the destiny of us all: the struggle to save ourselves from our own ruin.

My First Time: Sheri Holman

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands.  Today's guest is Sheri Holman whose new novel, Witches on the Road Tonight, tells the story of Eddie Alley--moving from his childhood in Depression-era Appalachia where he helped his mother (one of the titular witches) gather herbs on the hillsides, to the end of his life as Captain Casket, a campy 1970s TV horror-movie host whose glory has faded.  I'll have a full review later, but for now I can tell you the novel is a bubbling cauldron full of some very fine writing.  Regular readers of this blog know my appreciation for Holman's work runs long and deep: witness my fanboy love for her two earlier novels, The Mammoth Cheese and The Dress Lodger.  Her first novel, A Stolen Tongue, is about a 15th-century monk on a pilgrimage to gather the scattered body parts of a dead female saint.  It's on deck on my Kindle and, after reading about its genesis in the following essay, I'm even more intrigued by what's in store for me.

My First Mentors 

When I was 21, I moved from Virginia to New York to become a Shakespearean actress.  I was very determined and very specific.  There would be no dog food commercials for me.  It took about a year before I learned the Hermias and Hermiones were few and far between, and when I began to consider stolen packets of crackers from the Hell's Kitchen Bojangles a meal, it seemed time to get a job.  I had a decent liberal arts education and read constantly, so I signed up with a temp agency, hoping to get a job in a publishing house.  Several weeks later, I found myself placed at Penguin Books.  I worked as a liaison between the editorial and marketing departments, and in those pre-computer days (1988!) spent most of my time retyping copy for the catalogs and reading free books under my desk.  I'd been temping at Penguin for two years, earning a small paycheck and occasionally auditioning for plays, when one day, my life was forever altered by a word I'd never encountered before: Advance.

Kathryn Harrison, a young editor a few cubicles away, had just received a big one for her new novel and everyone was talking about it.  I remember stopping an editorial assistant in the hallway and asking, How do you get this magical thing called an advance?  She explained it to me as she would to a sweet but slightly dull child.  First you have to write a book, she said.  Then, if it's good, they give you money which you have to earn back.  I remember nodding sagely and saying, I guess I should get started then, because I, too, would like to get an advance.

I had written seriously in high school, but dropped it in college.  I had one short story to my name, which I'd submitted to The New Yorker, figuring once they rejected me, I'd work my way down.  (They did.)  I'd taken one creative writing class and a handful of workshops at the St. Mark's Poetry project in Manhattan.  But a few weeks after our chat in the hallway, I gave notice, emptied my bank account of all but $800 to be wired in case of emergency, bought a plane ticket to London and, because I heard it was cheap, another for the Magic Bus to Greece.  And thus began my career as a writer of books and earner of advances.

One day I'll write about those four months in Greece for my kids: boring old mom who once walked goat paths on Crete and lived naked in a cave, and stayed with nuns in a convent, getting up in the middle of the night for services and scribbling during the day.  I took a month-long detour through Turkey riding public buses down to the dusty border of Syria and up to the apple-rich northern border with Georgia.  I was young and thrilled to talk with anyone, eager for all stories.  I wrote in cafes and on the steps of museums and under bushes where I sometimes slept.  I filled notebook after notebook with images from Greek mythology spliced with a story I'd heard of a rhinoceros who escaped from the circus and leapt over a cliff.  Joined to that were memories of a Pentecostal girl I'd known in fifth grade, historical accounts from the life of Byron's lover Claire Clairmont and passages informed by the shame of my own one and only one-night-stand.  The story I built out of these disparate pieces was vivid and heartfelt.  It was also an utter mess.

I returned home tanned and skinny from swimming and eating nothing but chicken and yogurt, fired with literary excitement.  It would be nothing to find a new apartment and of course money would be no problem.  This advance would soon come along because I had almost finished my novel, and of course finishing something means it must sell.  You can imagine my surprise when I went to the bank to withdraw my $800 only to find all my money gone and my account shut down.  The friend with whom I'd left my bank card had taken all the funds I had in the world and skipped town.  I had about $100 in travelers checks left to live on.

Back to Penguin I went, but my old job had, of course, long since been filled.  It was October, and my summer tan had faded, when an old colleague told me that Molly Friedrich, Terry McMillan's agent was looking for an assistant.  “I'm a writer,” I remember telling Molly during the job interview.  “I don't really know what agents do, but I'll give this a year and we'll see how it goes.”  I can still see the look of amused indulgence on Molly's face, and can only imagine she assumed she'd fire me the minute she got back from the Frankfurt Book Fair.

A few months went by and miraculously I wasn't fired.  I had a good editorial sense and Molly and I held many similar opinions on people and things.  She was a generous, extremely honest mentor to me, and when I put the final words of my novel on paper (199 pages triple spaced), I worked up the courage to show it to her.  She took my manuscript home on a Friday.  I spent a suspenseful weekend, knowing one thing about Molly Friedrich--if she liked something, she moved fast.

On Monday morning she called me into her office.  I stood before her anxious and trembling, sensing the fate of my career and more importantly, my advance, was in her hands.  She held out my pages to me, sucked her teeth, and slowly shook her head: Where do I even start?

It was a first draft of a first novel by an untested and inexperienced kid.  At that age we have enormous ego, but little vanity, and so I asked her if she would do me one favor.  I asked if she would pick one editor who might give a second opinion.  Being perhaps the most honorable and charitable person I know, Molly agreed, and sent it to Marian Wood who was Sue Grafton's editor.  About a week later, the manuscript came back.  This time with a three-page single-spaced rejection letter.  It detailed all the novel's many flaws (including the seminal fact that with so many characters and so many swirling ideas it could barely be called a novel) but it was more encouraging than perhaps I deserved.

I put that first book away, and taught myself--over the next few years of reading manuscripts, good and bad--what novels really were.  I woke at 4:30 a.m. to write before work, I made multiple false starts and wrote too many final, final drafts, learning slowly and painfully, how to actually be a writer.  I forgot about advances.  Several years later when I brought Molly the story of a medieval monk on a pilgrimage to venerate the relics of his spiritual bride, St. Katherine of Alexandria, I was far more anxious and far more hopeful.  I had no more illusions that "done" meant "sold."  When Molly called me into her office after another weekend reading session, her eyes were brighter.  It won't be easy, she said, but let's try.

I suppose there are too many Firsts in this little piece.  First novel, first agent, first rejection, first advance.  That first attempt was like a backpack crammed full of clothes and rocks and painted icons, everything I'd picked up along the way, too heavy for its thin fabric and about to burst.  It's not coincidental that my first published novel was about the slow--sometimes exhilarating, sometimes tedious--journey along an unfamiliar road.  And I remain eternally grateful for all the generous guides along the way.