“This was a dangerous game. Wasn’t as simple as talking. There was more to it than that, and what Tolliver had said had been the truth – the dead weren’t required to help him.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett  (JAN 24, 2011)

In Koryta’s latest thriller – noir with a twist of the supernatural – it’s late summer 1935 and a group of hard-bitten WWI veterans and one talented 19-year-old are headed for the Florida Keys to build a highway bridge.

“They’d been on the train for five hours before Arlen Wagner saw the first of the dead men.” Wagner, a loner who’s taken the kid, Paul Brickhill, under his wing, developed a chilling battlefield talent during the war. He could look at living men and see death steal over them. “He could see skulls shining in the pale moonlight where faces belonged, hands of white bone clutching rifle stocks.”

He found he could save some too, change the course of their fate. Not all, not even many; but some. So when he looks around and sees that every last man on the train, including young Paul, is about to die, he tries to convince them to get off at the next stop. But it’s the middle of nowhere in backwoods Florida and these hungry men aren’t about to fall for some superstitious claptrap. He and Paul, a budding and natural engineer, are the only ones who stay behind and as they head out into the dark, “the summer night pressed down on them like a pair of strong hands, made each step feel like ten.”

They finally end up at an oddly deserted fishing resort – The Cypress House – presided over by a woman, Rebecca Cady, who could have stepped right out of a James M. Cain novel: “Beautiful, yes. The sort of gorgeous that haunted men, chased them over oceans and never left their minds, not even when they wanted a respite. But was she trustworthy? No. Arlen was sure of that.”

Paul, however, is smitten and even after a punishing run-in with the corrupt local sheriff, he’s determined to stick around and use his skills to make her life easier. His determination only grows after a powerful hurricane takes out the Cypress House generator as well as its boathouse and dock.

“The three of them went out onto the front porch once, with the building offering shelter between them and the wind, and took in the yard. Everything was awash with water, the sea moving all around them, as if they stood aboard a ship rather than a porch.”

This is the 1935 hurricane that destroyed the Florida Keys railroad, killed hundreds and put paid to any notion of building a Keys highway for many years to come. Wagner’s death vision has been fulfilled – all the men who were on the train were killed in the hurricane. And Wagner is becoming increasingly sure that the longer they stay at The Cypress House, the more they tempt the same fate, even as he finds his eyes – and thoughts – lingering longer on Rebecca Cady. The men who run things in this corrupt little backwater make their own law, and their hold over Cady is as absolute as it is mysterious. To save Paul, Wagner has some hard choices ahead.

Koryta keeps his dialog hard-edged. The noir atmosphere drips with steamy Gulf Coast humidity, and crackles with human chemistry. The supernatural element heightens the eerie feel while the story’s foundations go deep into the real hopelessness of the Depression. Sentence by sentence the prose draws the reader into the story but it all sags a bit in the middle. One of the strengths of classic noir is brevity, and that’s just not possible these days. People like their thrillers long and a certain amount of padding is all but inevitable it seems.

Nevertheless, Koryta builds to a tense, violent climax that makes full use of the swampy Florida setting and its backwoods denizens, as well as all of Wagner’s ingenuity and spooky sense.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 75 readers
PUBLISHER:	Little, Brown and Company (January 24, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Michael Koryta
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Ridge More hurricane based fiction: The Sound of Building Coffins by Louis Masitros And another novel with that eerie supernatural feel: Isabella by Laura Benedict

Bibliography:

• Envy the Night (2008)
• So Cold the River (2010)
• The Cypress House (2011)
• The Ridge (2011)
• The Prophet (August 2012)

Lincoln Perry series:

• Tonight I Said Goodbye (2004)
• Sorrow’s Anthem (2006)
• A Welcome Grave (2007)
• The Silent Hour (2009)

“I could feel my hair catch fire, then I could smell it. My flesh began to singe as if I were a scrap of meat newly thrown into the barbecue, and then I could hear the bubbling of my skin as the flames kissed it. I could not reach my head to extinguish my flaming hair.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (NOV 21, 2009)

The Gargoyle is one of the most gripping novels I have ever read. I am not one to usually read books more than once and I can probably count on two hands those novels that I’ve read two or three times. This is my second reading of The Gargoyle and it is even better the second time around.

The book is a first person narrative, told by a man who is severely burned in a car accident. He is driving in a ritzy sports car, stoned on cocaine, alcohol and other drugs du jour, when his car goes out of control. The bottle of booze he has been drinking from is held between his legs (a most unfortunate place for it to be) and when the car explodes in a wreck of fire, most all of his body turns to cinder. He is not expected to live, but miraculously he does. While recuperating in a rehabilitation hospital, he reflects on his past life as a good looking stud, a pornographer, drug addict, alcoholic and sex addict. He sees his life as valueless but does not know how to turn himself around. He is now a “monster” to most who see him – – a man without a face and with most of his body parts missing. He is in constant pain and his hospital rehabilitation is an effort that will take years to complete.

Amazingly, one day he is lying in his bed when a young woman named Marianne Engel, walks up to him and says quite simply, “You’ve been burned. Again.”  Marianne is a patient in the psychiatric ward but believes absolutely that she has known this burnt man in a prior life, some time in the early 1300’s when she was a nun and a scribe in the German village of Engelthal. Is she schizophrenic as her diagnosis reads or is she telling the truth? This is a hard question to cipher and forms the crux of the book.

The book is chilling in that Marianne knows many things about her paramour , things both simple and sublime. One amazing fact is that he was born with a small scar right near his heart and Marianne is aware of that. She is also aware of his life history, those events they shared and those that he suffered on his own.

I read this book with chills going up and down my spine, trying to decipher the truth(s) of the story as Marianne tells it. She captures her lover by telling him Scheherazade – like stories, one after the other, all about their lives together,
one story more interesting than the next.

Supposedly, Marianne is one of the great scribes of the town of Engelthal, writing a new version of the bible and a copy of Dante’s Inferno. Her style and script are unique and beautiful, not to be confused with anyone else’s.

What is revealed from these nights of stories after stories is that theirs was a great love, one that is to be repeated forever, through eternity. Whether the reader is a believer or a doubter, there is there is always the great question – – Could this have been possible? Is it still possible? Will this great love repeat itself through eternity?

Davidson is a writer of remarkable talent. I found it impossible to believe that this was his debut novel. He is able to combine several genres – – the psychological thriller, historical fiction, horror, and mythology. His genre is unique, and I, for one, was grasped from the first page and the story never left me outside its grip.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 313 readers
PUBLISHER:	Anchor; First Edition edition (August 4, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Andrew Davidson
EXTRAS:	Excerpt and Interview and Reader’s Guide
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Other explorations of “past lives:” Diary by Chuck Palahuniuk Fangland by John Marks Yes, My Darling Daughter by Margaret Leroy

Bibliography:

• The Gargoyle (August 2008)