Böcker av Larry Kearney

Jim, Carole and David engage in teenage clandestine romantic and erotic adventures, plotting and executing revenge against dangerous adults who have done them harm and physically threaten their lives. The novel grips us in a dark delight as they become the people they will become, and, in turn, perhaps have us trace back to the fruition of our own forgotten history. Fireball tells a tale of the immensity of children's lives, those they live out in secret, far from the reach of adult supervision and awareness.

Edward lives in Brooklyn not far from the narrowest part of the Hudson, across from Staten Island. Things happen to him all the time that he can't understand. In the school auditorium singing Silver Bells, Christmas, he faints and travels across the river to another place, not Staten Island, where everything seems drawn and flat-the fluttery, papery world of the unsuccessfully dead. When Edward's mother dies suddenly of a stroke, his seizures become more intense. Mrs. Parenti shows up at their house to explain to Edward's father that he may well have a gift which she could help develop through her séances held in a mysterious townhouse Edward fears but is keenly interested in. Edward's father, bereaving, isn't.

Kate, who has been put away for years in a hospital for the criminally insane, is out now and living by the railroad tracks in a furnished room. Phoebe, ostensibly Nancy's mother, is running scared and putting out contracts with an Albany hit man. The Mayor of this same small upstate New York town is found dead in his office with knitting needles stabbed into his eyes. Lester Mather, community stalwart, is stabbed in the heart. A minor gangster named Nickie is found shot in the head by the river. Nancy's father kills himself. The local psychiatrist is found in his garage with his neck cut through by a pair of shears. At times tender and abysmal, always engaging in energetic jumps from scene to scene, its many characters, their secrets, obsessions, and rich moments of eloquent madness makes Pale Horse a fierce event, perhaps where Dostoyevsky and True Detective meet and wrestle each other in the dark of night.

Tom Cahill thinks the two voices on the harassing phone calls he's been receiving are actually one person. But they are indeed different predators: Eddie Branagan, telling him what he's going to do to his daughter Laura; Phil LaPorta, painting a picture of how great a man Tom, a newspaper columnist, really is. Because the novel cuts back and forth between otherwise total strangers suspense is rendered all the more palpable; and the place, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, shows its many sides in and out of our collective American past. Beetlebomb is a pan through mundane time and place, written in opposition to the otherwise unspoken sources of human shame and brutality.