LITERARYFICTION
DESPERATION ROAD by Michael Farris Smith (No Exit Press £14.99) NEWLY released from prison after serving 11 years for killing a man while driving drunk, Russell Gaines returns to his home town, thinking his debt to society has been paid.
It’s a view not shared by the dead man’s two brothers, one of whom is mentally unstable and bent upon violent revenge.
At the same time, Maben, a homeless young woman, is so exhausted from walking the highway with her small daughter that she spends her last few dollars on a cheap motel for a night’s rest.
But later that night she makes a bad decision that leads to the shooting of a policeman. When their two stories collide, Russell must resist the urge to help someone even more of an outcast than he is — or risk life, limb and the possibility of being locked up again to do what his compassion says is the right thing.
Award-winning author Michael Farris Smith depicts a steamy American South redolent of lawless menace in sparse, simple, lyrical prose. He has produced a taut thriller that lays bare the legacy that violence leaves behind it, as it builds relentlessly to a dramatic climax. You will not be disappointed.
EUPHORIA by Heinz Helle (Serpent’s Tail £11.99) FIVE thirty-something men who have been enjoying one of their regular weekend breaks in a remote cabin in the Austrian Alps emerge from it to discover that during their holiday the world as they knew it has come to an end.
They trudge through the inhospitable landscape, at first hopeful of discovering some remaining civilisation, but nothing they come across offers them anything but despair: a crashed helicopter, a lone child whose parents’ skulls have been crushed, a burned-out nightclub full of charred bodies.
Gradually, optimism fades and the purpose of their quest narrows to the most basic of needs; to find food and wood to keep them from freezing to death in the wintry landscape. Death stalks them one by one and, as survival becomes paramount, human nature turns savage.
The German writer Heinz Helle’s second, very short, novel echoes the theme of William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies: that in a world where the rules and restraint of society have been swept away, Man becomes a beast whose only aim is to remain alive.
This bleak book is a quick read, but also a profound and extremely unsettling one with a powerful message for our increasingly hate-filled times.
CARNIVALESQUE by Neil Jordan (Bloomsbury £16.99) THE new novel by the prize-winning author and Oscar-winning filmmaker Neil Jordan is a strange, surreal coming-of-age story set in a travelling carnival visited by a boy, Andy, and his parents.
He enters the hall of mirrors on his own and is absorbed into one of them, trapped in the glass, while his reflection steps out of it and joins his parents.
The Andy imprisoned in the mirror is rescued from it by Mona, a carnival acrobat, and elects to leave his boring provincial Irish life and stay with the carnival, helping to set it up and take it down as it moves from town to town.
Meanwhile, the substitute Andy disturbs his mother with his new self-contained persona, an unyielding blankness and refusal to engage with her and his father.
This is a character with which, of course, any parent of an adolescent child will be familiar: the person you knew and loved who suddenly morphs into a sullen being from outer space.
The narrative becomes increasingly weird and, though written in beautifully poetic prose, it doesn’t truly engage the reader’s emotions.