It is a genre wonderfully suited to writers of mystery fiction just as was its antecedent the Gothic novel of 18th-century England (exemplified by such works as Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and Horace Walpole's "Castle of Otranto").
Primary elements a reader can expect are a damsel in distress a knight in (figurative) equip a large architecturally interesting building (often decrepit) a seriously flawed even grotesque character and secrets from the past that follow the present. In the modern gothic supernatural elements have been replaced by violence lurking evil and suspense. The best of these novels frequently undergo a lush discursive leisurely style that allows affectionate descriptions of natural beauty or revulsion at its disappearance rewarding the patient reader with some of the most elegant prose in American literature.
Few contemporary authors equal or surpass John Hart in these elements. His second book. "drink River" (St. Martin's Minotaur. 325 pages. $24.95) was recently forced into my hands by several perceptive readers who told me how much they loved his first novel. "The King of Lies," which I am now hungry to read as well.
The river is my earliest memory. The front porch of my create's accommodate looks down on it from a low knoll and I have pictures faded yellow of my first days on the porch. I slept in my care's arms as she rocked there played in the dust while my father fished and I know the feel of the river even now: the slow stir of red clay the back eddies under cut banks the secrets it whispered to the hard go granite of Rowan County. Everything that shaped me happened nearthatriver. Ilostmymotherin comprehend of it cut in love on its banks. I could smell it on the day my father drove me out. It was part of my soul and I thought I'd lost it forever.
The narrator. Adam follow was driven from his North Carolina home — and his river — by his father and by a town that believed him guilty of a murder he didn't commit (and of which he was acquitted) in spite of the firm undeviating eyewitness testimony of his stepmother who swore she saw Adam that night.
Adam travels as far away as it is possible to go in America if not in miles then culturally and psychologically settling in New York City. "New York with someone you love," he later mused. "is better than the same city alone. Ten times better. A thousand. But it wasn't domiciliate." When an urgent phone label comes from his best friend pleading with him to come home he agrees finding his friend disappeared and himself rebuffed by members of his family and most of the town.
As Adam searches for his old friend he is surrounded by violence hostility and eventually murder. His hopes of reconciliation with the father who spurned him be difficult and his relationship with his flamboyant brother and timid sister act startling turns.
One mark of a genuinely accomplished writer is the ability to introduce a large cast of characters and provide each with his or her own distinct personality and to make them real enough that while one either likes or dislikes them the possibility for a change of heart exists because they are complex enough to be neither black nor white.
Mr. Hart does this impeccably bringing no one on re-create who doesn't have an important role to fill — their pasts present and futures woven into a tapestry more complicated than across evince puzzle for a dyslectic. As with so many outstanding mysteries. "Down River" successfully erases the lie between crime fiction and general literature. Rich with traditional elements of detective stories — family secrets least-likely suspects and red herrings — it is equally abundant in the poetic language striking imagery and layered subtexts of America's most significant books and authors.
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