Through Dreams and Visions: Anne C. Petty's SHAMAN'S BLOOD

Anne C. Petty. Shaman’s Blood. San Mateo CA: JournalStone, 5 August 2011, 272pp. Hardcover, $27.95. ISBN-10: 1936564211; ISBN-13: 978-1936564217. * * * Trade paperback, $12.95. ISBN-10: 1936564203; ISBN-13: 978-1936564200 * * * Kindle ebook edition, #5.79. ASIN: B005FR1AD4.

After finishing the first 75 pages or so of Anne C. Petty’s Shaman’s Blood, I wrote the following note to remind me of one point I wanted to make in any review I might write:

Shaman’s Blood is somewhat difficult to get into. The opening chapters alternate between present-day and 1953, although since the dates are clearly given, that presents little difficulty. What are more problematical are the frequent hints of past events and adumbrations of future events within each chapter that are never quite clearly defined and that keep the individual chapters from flowing freely. Add to that the fact that the book intimates early on that all of the main characters are somehow related and have shared hideous, even monstrous—but undescribed—visions, and it requires an unusual amount of confidence in the author to continue.

Normally, when I come upon what seems a major bobble in a novel, I ask myself two questions: (1) Does the apparent problem stem from the author’s ignorance, and if so what do I need to say to suggest ways to overcome it; or (2) Does the apparent problem stem from my ignorance of the author’s purposes, and if so, how does the novel demonstrate that it is not, after all, a problem.

I like to give authors the benefit of the doubt. After all, it takes courage to write a novel and send it out into the wild unknowns of the reading public. And it takes work, dedication, and care even to write a novel—so I try to be as generous as possible when reviewing one.

Now that I’ve completed Shaman’s Blood, the resolution seems fairly straightforward. The novel is a complex blend of the hallucinatory and the real, with visionary characters frequently intruding upon our world and interacting with real characters in frightening ways, and real characters likewise intruding upon the worlds of dreams and visions and interacting with visionary characters in equally frightening ways.

The landscape constantly shifts, from an almost mystical but vivid and terrifying Florida backwoods replete with magic and dangers; to the hallucinogenically kaleidoscopic streets of San Francisco at the height the age of the hippies; to coastal Florida, normal and sedate on the surface but concealing decades of black magic, of death, of curses that weave throughout time and eternity; to the outback of Australia with its heritage of spiritual walk-abouts and its immortal protectors, their images and their powers etched by aboriginal shamans onto the very stones of the desolate wastes.

And time blends fluidly, past to present, present to future, making it essentially impossible to tell the story in any other way and still maintain the sense that real and unreal, here and there, then and now are little more than convenient labels used in an unattainable attempt to understand the multiple possibilities of the cosmos.

At its core, Shaman’s Blood is a Quest novel. In a climactic moment, one of the characters exclaims, “The thing I drew…it’s a magical object, some kind of holy grail. In the trance, I saw how it got created for a tribe by one of their gods. Then something happened to it, stolen or something. But really, I’m just guessing. The snake spirit I channeled said I’m supposed to return it. But how can I return something I don’t even have?” (146).

Therein rest the challenges that have extended over six generations. What is the object? Where is the object? What are its powers? To whom does it belong? Where does it belong? Who must return it? What sacrifice of life—or sanity—will the attempt to return it require? How are all of the significant characters that have come into contact with it related? Why does the curse associated with it, including night- and day-time visions of horrendous creatures, follow one bloodline? And how can mere mortals even hope to contend with the evil, powerfully magical creatures of shadowlands?

Petty does a good job weaving all of these questions—along with some of the answers—into the fabric of a novel. True, the flashbacks and flashforwards continue almost throughout the novel. And true, it is at times difficult to determine precisely what is happening, whether it is real or visionary.
But also true, Shaman’s Blood offers unique insights into the worlds of magic, especially Australian mythology. Tales told by tribal “senior men,” as well as tales too sacred to be told outright, combine with the modern world to create an engaging, intriguing, and ultimately enjoyable excursion into the intricacies of belief and unbelief.

As long as the reader remembers to trust the author and the structural decisions her subject has forced upon her.

Recommended.

  

In Memoriam: Miss Mabel Grafel

Mrs. Robinson and Miss Grafel

This morning I received an email telling me that my fifth-grade teacher, Miss Mabel Grafel, passed away last week at the age of 97.
Judi and I had had the opportunity to visit with her about ten years or so ago (she was in her eighties at the time), so I didn’t really have a sense of Oh, I wish I could have told her…. Still, I read the news with a pang.

Few people have been so instrumental in molding my adult life as she was.

My love affair with Miss Grafel really began while I was in Mrs. Robinson’s fourth-grade class at Burlington Elementary School in Billings, Montana. I don’t have very many clear memories from childhood but I do remember sitting in my desk in Mrs. Robinson’s class and looking out the open door and across the hall to where Miss Grafel could frequently be seen moving up and down the rows of students. Two things stand out to this day: the passion which she brought to teaching and the tables along the windows where she kept dozens of African violets that bloomed profusely throughout the year, bringing color and life to bleak Montana winters. Occasionally I would see signs that she maintained strict discipline in her classes—once or twice, I saw her snap a ruler at the back of a student’s hand (then that was perfectly within the prerogatives of an elementary teacher…and Miss Grafel used that ruler to good ends).

Even so, for whatever reasons, all during that fourth-grade year, I wished that I were in her class.

During that summer, my older sister, who in fact had been in that class although I couldn’t see her desk from where I sat across the hall, let it be known that she was going to grow up and be a teacher. To get in practice, she, my brother and other sister, and I held daily practice runs in the basement. Cleta was the teacher and we were her students, sitting dutifully at her feet and learning about adding and subtracting and dividing and multiplying…and reading. Especially about reading.

Cleta so completely channeled Miss Grafel’s love of teaching that the daily classrooms became our primary activity. For years afterward, out mother used to claim—with more than a hint of pride in her voice—that she was the only mother on the block (which included probably thirty or so elementary-school-aged children) who had to send her kids outside to play for at least an hour a day.

She would also talk about how eager—and anxious—I was for school to start that fall. I wanted to be in Miss Grafel’s class. Apparently, my desire was so strong that it nearly made me sick, so it was with a tremendous sense of relief when we received our school assignments and I saw that I had indeed been placed in her class.

What I didn’t know—and would not know for some years—was that Miss Grafel had gone through the names of incoming fifth-graders and picked me for her class.

Nor did I know for some time that on the first day of school, my mother confronted Miss Grafel after class and told her in no uncertain terms that if she ever compared my work with my sister’s, or me to my sister, my mother would, in her words, “yank him from that class so fast it will make your head spin and send him to his grandmother’s for the rest of the school year.”

Now, my mother was a pretty intimidating person. I still cringe at the thought of the tongue-lashings waitresses received for putting mayonnaise on a BLT in a restaurant, or for mixing up items on orders. And that carried over into every aspect of her life…and her children’s.  So I can only imagine her reaction when Miss Grafel straightened to her full height (which, to a particularly short almost-eleven-year-old, seemed like at least ten feet) and stared right back at her. “Mrs. Collings, I don’t ever compare students’ work.” And she never did.

I don’t recall much from the day-to-day lessons in Miss Grafel’s fifth-grade class. I remember thinking that the word ‘perimeter’, which came up in math one day, was probably pronounced perry-meter, until Miss Grafel spoke it out loud. That was the first time my early training in phonetics played me wrong, and from then on I was wary about saying new words out loud. (About the same time, I had a Sunday School teacher who would frequently talk about her little idi-o-syn-CRA-sies, so at least I wasn’t the only one with the problem.)

I remember her reading stories to the class. We could rest our heads on our desks while Miss Grafel read book after book. One was about a basset hound named ‘Potlicker’ who, at the end of the story, was killed by a passing train. That was the first time I remember crying over a character in a story.

But most of all I remember moments after class, when most of the other students had raced out to head home as soon as possible.

Once in a while I would stay behind. Cleta would find me in the classroom, watching as Miss Grafel watered and groomed her stable of African violets and talk to me about the plants. She would occasionally pinch off a leaf and show me how to fill a cup with moist soil, secure plastic wrap around the cup’s rim, and push the leaf stem through a small hole. I would take the cup home and, in a few days, when the leaf began to root, transplant it to a small pot. After a while, I had half a dozen African violets of my own growing on the window sill.
That’s pretty much what I remember…but I know that more must have happened because I graduated from fifth-grade every bit as determined to become a school teacher as my sister had been.

Both of us remained true to that determination, Cleta as a teacher in the Tehachapi California junior high school, and me as a professor of English at Pepperdine University for nearly thirty years. And both of us credit Miss Grafel with first instilling that desire.

During my school years, I was blessed with several extraordinary teachers. I remember Miss McGranahan, who taught high-school biology and cancelled a scheduled test so that we could watch John Glenn begin the first orbital flight of the earth—“Nothing I could say today would be as important as seeing this happen,” she told us.

At Whittier College, Dr. Gilbert McEwen showed me, perhaps more than any other professor, how to communicate a love of literature to students. Dr. Harry Nerhood, of the history department, encouraged me to learn and love research, going so far as to sponsor me in several semesters of independent study. And Dr. William Geiger took my incipient love of Milton and the Renaissance and nurtured it until it became full-fledged. It was on his advice that I began graduate studies at the University of  Riverside, California.

There were two compelling reasons for me to attend Riverside. First, my family lived there, which would give me a kind of home-base when needed. And second, Professor John M. Steadman, a world-class Milton scholar, taught in the English program.

My first graduate class was with Dr. Steadman—a seminar on the Epic as literary form. At the first mid-class break (we met for three hours once a week), I felt like quitting school and becoming a ditch digger. I hadn’t understood a thing he said. Then I overheard two fourth-year grad students talking.

“Did you follow that?”

“Not a word of it.”

I figured that if they were as lost as I was, maybe I could make it through the program. By the second and third weeks, I had discovered that Dr. Steadman simply knew more than any other person I had ever (or have ever) encountered. And he did us the honor of assuming that his students were equally knowledgeable. We weren’t, but that didn’t keep us from trying to catch up with him. We never did. Still, being exposed to an intellect of his caliber was the most stimulating part of my graduate experience. I took a course from him every semester—he only taught one class at a time, and fortunately he didn’t repeat any while I was there. Eventually he became my dissertation advisor and the chair of my doctoral committee. He placed my doctoral hood on my shoulders at commencement, the symbol that I had completed by formal education.

Each of these men and women contributed immeasurably to the person—the teacher—I was to become.

But at the beginning, and as a memory-presence throughout, was Miss Mabel Grafel.

Around thirty years ago—at least two decades after my tenure in her class--while I was mid-career at Pepperdine, I had several recurrent dreams about Miss Grafel. I mentioned them to Judi, and, being of the practical sort, she said, “Why don’t you call her?”

I called directory assistance for Billings, Montana, and received a single listing for M. Grafel. When I dialed the number, a cheerful voice answered, “Mabel Grafel.”

“Are you the Mabel Grafel who taught at”—here I stumbled, because I had almost forgotten the name of the school; then it came to me—“at Burlington School?”

There was a slight pause before she said, “Yes.”

“Well, I was one of your students. Michael Collings.”

There was a slightly longer pause, then: “Michael! How are you? How is Cleta? And Bruce and Valerie?”

She remembered us all, even though only two of us had been in her class. What a thrill!

It turned out that she and a number of other retired teachers were planning a trip to Hawaii the next week and that she would be passing through Los Angeles on her way. We agreed to meet at the airport.

When the time came, we bundled our four children in the car, and Judi and I went to meet her.  I remember looking for this ten-foot-tall, stern-faced authority-figure and nearly passing by a neat, diminutive woman with soft grey hair and a smiling face. We had a wonderful if short reunion, and I had the opportunity to introduce her to my family, and my children to the person who had taught me to want to teach.

Twenty years later, Judi and I took a trip to Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, and stopped in Billings. I didn’t expect Miss Grafel to still be there, but she was…living in a tiny little ivy-covered house (which she had shared with her mother until her mother’s death) filled with memorabilia—and African violets. Even though she was in her eighties at the time, she was as bright, as full of life, as energetic as always. We had a delightful visit.

Thinking back over it, except for family, there is no single individual who has played such an integral part of my life for as many years—from when I was a child of ten to when I was a husband, father (and grandfather), and teacher. A number of years ago, I tried to express in words her effect on me and on my life. The result was three versions of a poem—“Mabel Grafel (I),” “Mabel Grafel (II),” and “African Violets.” None of them quite realized what I was after, but each tried to suggest what this woman meant to a shy, bookish, somewhat introverted boy who found a life-long calling through her. Here is one of them:

Mabel Grafel

Mabel Grafel--unsmiling, iron-haired,
Grim gargoyle to all fifth-grade rowdies--
Kept rows of violets in neat formations on
A narrow table tucked as if
A lonely afterthought beneath high
Window-banks along the north-most wall of
Burlington School. 
                                        That winter,
Snow began in January and fell for weeks.
The road to Burlington was graded once a day,
But we small pupils scuttled between iced
Prison walls that towered two feet
Over us as we threaded our long three miles
To the school.
                                     Everything froze.
Headbolt heaters froze while still
Plugged into engines; sewer lines burst,
Turning whole long blocks of new backyards
Into only slightly fragrant skating rinks--
We ran short PhysEd races on ice-slick walks,
Tucked inside thick fur-lined parkas, and still
Half-froze our lips and noses with each painful
Breath.
                                  But in her  room, laid out
In rigid rows upon brown boards that glowed
Rich birch-grain-gold in the angled light,
Her violets prismed winter into spring.

Thank you, Miss Grafel, for the African Violets…and for everything else.

After WOLF’S HOUR: Stephen M. DeBock’s THE PENTACLE PENDANT.

Stephen M. DeBock. The Pentacle Pendant. San Mateo CA: JournalStone, 14 October 2011. 258 pp., $12.95, trade paperback. ISBN: 1936564270; ISBN-13: 978-1936564279. * * * $27.95, hardcover. ISBN-10: 1936564289; ISBN-13: 978-1936564286. * * * 942kb. $6.00, Kindle edition. ASIN: B005RR5BL4.

My standard of excellence for werewolf tales is—and probably will long remain—Robert R. McCammon’s ambitious, deft, and seamless Wolf’s Hour, with its superb rendition of a hero, Michael Gallatin, caught between two worlds, between two ways of being, yet able to function completely in both. I have read other werewolf stories, of course—I still enjoy the many manifestations of Stephen King’s Cycle of the Werewolf/Silver Bullet—and I have written my own versions, but McCammon’s is the one I return to and reread with expanding pleasure.

So, then, how does Stephen M. DeBock’s The Pentacle Pendant measure up?

Well, on the one hand, it is no Wolf’s Hour.

On the other hand, it doesn’t attempt to be; and at what it attempts to be, it succeeds admirably.

Wolf’s Hour is, for want of a better term, global in scope. It encompasses the horrors of Nazi Germany and its threat to freedom around the world. It works well on an individual level, which may well be the only way to tell such a story, but McCammon makes it clear that Gallatin’s private successes and failures will have ramifications far beyond his own survival. He blends the two visions—microscopic and macroscopic—beautifully, to such a degree that readers care as much for the outcome of Gallatin’s mission as they do for his own struggles to create and hold on to a personal identity.

The Pentacle Pendant, on the other hand, is domestic. It concentrates on an individual, Claire Delaney, who is abruptly thrust into a world of ecstatic power and nightmarish guilt. Turned by her lover, who prefers the term metamorph to the more traditional werewolf or the clinically distanced lycanthrope, she must cope with her twin identities and their consequences, intentional and unintentional, on everyone she knows and loves. To that extent, Wolf’s Hour is the werewolf story writ large, and designedly so; Pendant is the werewolf story writ smaller…and also designedly so.

Nor is The Pentacle Pentacle exclusively dedicated to the metamorph. The heroine’s quandary, in both its moral and its physical senses, is aggravated by the existence of yet another extra-human in her life, although for most of the novel Claire has no suspicions that she has unwittingly made a mortal enemy of a hemophage…or, in more common parlance, a vampire. It is not an accident that the final confrontation in The Pentacle Pendant occurs between two species of extra-human beings. Nor is it accidental that both werewolf and vampire appear in the same novel; the conclusion of their savage battle reveals that key elements of the plot depend upon both being present, upon both viciously and savagely attacking each other, and upon both spilling copious amounts of the opponent’s blood.

In spite of the differences between McCammon’s vision of the werewolf and DeBock’s, the two novels share much, most critically the extent to which they treat the werewolf/metamorph seriously. Both assiduously remove accumulated layers of mythology and legend to concentrate their attention on the most important element—the human being in the temporary guise of a wolf. At the core of both stories is the same question: “Does the werewolf have a soul?” Both use a similar image in exploring that question, the werewolf, not as a mindless killer reveling in blood and gore (although both novels have their fair share of violence), but rather as a cleanser and purifier. Early in The Pentacle Pendant, Lukas (who has initiated Claire’s transformation into metamorph) states: I’ve never killed wantonly. My parents taught me that. They were good people, and they followed my grandparents’ example. Listen, my German ancestors took out many a Nazi during the war, but never a Jew or nor a Romani did they harm. Nor, for that matter, an intellectual or a homosexual” (43). Claire follows that example. Her few victims are vicious victimizers—murderers, abusers of humans and animals, womanizers.

Significantly, the vampire-figure thinks in precisely the opposite terms, validating herself as a villain when she boasts that she has “fed on both Germans and Jews, and their blood tasted basically the same, even those who kept a Kosher household” (177)—an equal-opportunity slaughterer of humans and beasts.

This is not to say that The Pentacle Pendant is a serious, sober, quasi-scholarly treatment of the metamorph. It can be gory and gruesome when the plot requires it, especially in the early pages when the nature of the metamorph is most under scrutiny. Shedding blood causes Claire unbelievable inner torment; at the same time, much like Clifford D. Simak’s lopers in his classic short story “Desertion,” she exults in the glory and the freedom she discovers as a wolf, which makes her moral crisis that much more heart-rending. The cruelest and potentially most shocking moment in the novel is in fact not actually recounted. Only obliquely does DeBock let readers know that a two-month-old baby has been killed. To have described the scene as fully as he does the deaths in the first portions of the book would have been unendurably callous, given the circumstances of that death. Language, too, can become coarse at times, although again DeBock nicely modulates his language and the language of his characters to meet the occasion.

The novel can also be comic, in much the same way that many of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies incorporate comic subplots. De Bock often eases tensions that have been building over several pages with a light-hearted display of verbal play—puns in particular, outright jokes on occasion. Those moments allow readers a respite from the horror of death and psychically prepare them for greater horrors to come.  

There are twists and turns in the final pages that promise to lift Claire Delaney beyond the ‘domestic’ and into the ‘global’. Some are surprising, given the closely knit, even intimate relationships among characters in the early chapters (although perceptive readers might legitimately be expected to anticipate several of them); others develop out of revelations in later chapters and abruptly but acceptably move the book in new directions.

And at the end there is the potential for sequels every bit engaging as the original. After all, if there are metamorphs and hemophages loose in the world, what other kinds of outré creatures might also exist as threats to human life and society? It would be intriguing to see Claire gain the maturity, the self-control, and the secure sense of self-identity that would enable her to go out into the world…and help purify it.

Highly recommended. Some moments of R-rated sex and violence (but what else would you expect in a werewolf story?)

Fire in the Pasture: Gleaning After the Harvest

Fire in the Pasture: Twenty-first Century Mormon Poets. Edited by Tyler Chadwick. El Cerrito CA: PeculiarPages, 15 October 2011. 546 pp. $17.99, trade paperback.  ISBN-10: 0981769667; ISBN-13: 978-0981769660

First things first: a necessary disclaimer—Fire in the Pasture: Twenty-first Century Mormon Poets includes five of my poems, pieces that I am proud of and that I am pleased to have available to a wide audience.

Having made that admission, I intend to continue writing about the anthology for three reasons: (1) my meager contributions constitute less than 1% of the total—five pages out of nearly 550; (2) Collings Notes is my personal site, which means I can post whatever interests me—and the possibilities and directions of contemporary poetry by LDS writers interests me enormously; and (3) regardless of numbers 1 and 2 above, this collection is such a treasure-house of riches that it deserves all of the attention it can garner—and as many readers as possible.

Tyler Chadwick’s highly perceptive “Preface” gives a brief overview of LDS poetry during the past half century, beginning with Richard H. Cracroft and Neal E. Lambert and their seminal collection, A Believing People: Literature of the Latter-day Saints (1974), followed by Eugene England and Dennis Clark and Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems (1989). In some senses, these two volumes helped to define a “Mormon poetics” for the twentieth-century, and Harvest remained the standard collection for over two decades.

Fire continues that work, with a slight but significant departure from its predecessor. Rather than being a compilation of “Contemporary Mormon Poems,” with the implication that each of the poems contained therein will somehow reveal its inherent “Mormon-ness” to a discerning reader, Fire shifts attention to “Twenty-first Century Mormon Poets”—the difference being that this collection concentrates on the poetry (and thereby the poetics) of poets who are Mormons.
On poets.

Since the term “Mormon” is itself capable of multiple meanings—defined by doctrinal adherence, cultural behaviors, or familial ties, among others—the key term, I think, remains poets. And in Fire, readers will find—to borrow Dryden’s assessment of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales—poets that reveal to us “God’s plenty.”  Literally something for everyone.

I tend toward formalism in my own writing. I appreciate the effect of clear-cut structure merged seamlessly with form, resulting in something with a strength that exceeds the sum of the two parts. And in Fire, I find that. A sonnet that doesn’t reveal its meticulous adherence to tradition until the final couplet—the text reads as smoothly and as convincingly as might the finest prose…but beneath it lies a complex tissue of sound patterning, rhythm, rhyme (both end and internal) and compression, all serving the ends of a powerful message. Or a villanelle that is equally deft in both structure and meaning. A sestina that uses repetition so masterfully that the final word in each line—and their recurrence in the envoi—seems both inevitable and surprising. Quintets. Quatrains. Tercets. Decasyllabic lines (not to be confused with blank verse, which also occurs). Elegies, pastoral and otherwise. An eclogue.

Since Fire emphasizes twenty-first century publications, many of the poems are free verse in all of its variety. Long-line verse. Breath unit. Nonce structures that keep the free verse both free and verse; there are no samples of prose chopped helter-skelter into oddly shaped lines that dribble down the margin of the page.

Everywhere in Fire readers will find evidence of artistry, of control and discipline, of structure wedded to content…of poetry.

What they will not discover, however, is Mormon verse. That is, doctrine scantly or overtly dressed up in the costumes of rhyme and rhythm. Some poems are firmly embedded within easily recognizable LDS beliefs, but none of them are overwhelmed by those beliefs. Many of the pieces solidly and powerfully affirm and re-affirm the core concepts of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints without becoming exercises in sentimentality or cliché. And many of them reflect the intriguing recognition that, even without explicit LDS references to matters of faith and practice, they could only have been written by someone with an LDS background. As Susan Elizabeth Howe states in her Foreword, “To perceive of life as having an eternal purpose and of choices as having eternal consequences leads Mormon poets to serious engagement with their subjects,” whether those subjects entail experiences recalled and re-invented, contexts imagined or actual.

Fire in the Pasture is not a volume to be read in a day, or a week, or perhaps in a month or longer. Page after page reveals fruits to be tasted, savored, lingered over, and transmuted into ideas and images that may change lives. Each reader will discover favorites that speak directly to the individual’s mind and heart—and for that reason I have hesitated to point to particular titles that pleased me, since what I look for in poetry may not be consonant with what others seek. Instead, at one point or another, with one poem or another, the anthology is likely to feed any hunger, resonate with any need.

Highly recommended.

   

   

Welcome to the JOKERS CLUB!

Bastianelli, Gregory. Jokers Club.  San Francisco: JournalStone. Kindle edition, 28 October 2011. 360 kb. $6.00. ASIN: B0060Y5DMA.

San Francisco: JournalStone, 4 November 2011. 202 pp., $26.95 hc. ISBN-10: 1936564319, ISBN-13: 978-1936564316.

San Francisco: JournalStone, 4 November 2011. 202 pp., $11.95 trade pb. ISBN-10: 1936564300, ISBN-13: 978-1936564309.

Toward the end of Gregory Bastianelli’s Jokers Club, the narrator, Geoffrey Thorn, composes his own six-word epitaph: “He was a teller of tales” (179). In many ways, the words can stand not only for the narrator’s life but for the novel as well: Jokers Club is essentially a story about a story about a story….

When five adult members of a childhood “Jokers Club” attempt a reunion in their home town, things immediately begin going wrong, particularly for Thorn, who is struggling to recover his long-lost enthusiasm for writing, laboring to re-create (or perhaps create) through stories the reality of his past associations with the other club members, and wrestling with the consequences of a recently diagnosed brain tumor—including horrendous headaches, increasingly terrifying hallucinations, and the overwhelming sense of the presence of death. As each of the other men arrives and reveals both truth and secrets about their adult lives, the relations among them become physically and psychologically strained. When one of them is found brutally murdered, the closeness they had once felt finally and forever disintegrates beneath a hail of fear, suspicion, hatred, and ultimately, madness.

When more bodies begin appearing, the impact upon each member of the Jokers Club intensifies…except for one of them.

The only one who was not expected at the reunion, Jason Nightingale.

The novel begins by evoking Nightingale’s presence, but significantly indirectly, through story-telling. The first line informs readers that the as-yet-unnamed narrator has “only typed a single line on the page”; and that line reads: “Jason Nightingale had no idea when he joined the Jokers Club of the horrible events that would follow.”

Horrible indeed, not only for himself but for every member of the Jokers Club, for their families, for those still living in the old home town. Death by asphyxiation, by impalement, by slit throat stalks each of the boys-become-men, striking in the darkness, wielded by unknown hands.

Bastianelli does a fine job of guiding readers through the intricacies of Thorn’s multi-leveled tales. He deftly intercuts first-person narrative with third-person story-telling as Thorn uncovers a bit more of the truth about the Club’s past, then couples that awareness with memories and re-casts the hybrid into story form, each story told by an apparently omniscient narrator and including Thorn as a character. In this way, Bastianelli controls the readers’ increasing understanding about both  the horrible things that happened to Jason Nightingale and the equally horrible and terrifying things that continue to happen to Geoffrey Thorn as he works his way closer to the final revelation.

In its way, Jokers Club suggests the best of child-into-adult, cross-generational horror on the order of King’s IT, and childhood rite-of-passage stories such as King’s “The Body.” There is much the same nostalgia for times past—times of innocence and experience that can never be recaptured; times that shaped the adults the boys were to become and made inevitable their individual tragedies. Imagistically, it echoes such equally successful horror tales as King’s “Gramma,” with its bloated, bed-ridden, monstrous mother; and the famously ambiguous scene in Golding’s Lord of the Flies, in which boys cluster almost reverently around a severed animal’s head and, by doing so, announce and accept their descent into evil.

Jokers Club is about truth and falsity, sanity and madness, innocence and guilt, life and death. It presents clearly defined portraits of weakness and strength. And at the same time it intrudes the spectre of the supernatural (who is that character in the many-belled joker’s cap who speaks to Thorn so often?), of the unknown, and of the unknowable. There are twists and turns aplenty, especially as the novel shifts back and forth from Thorn’s narratives to the tales that he tells.

And no fair peeking ahead. This tale-telling is not over until the final page. Wait for it…. Wait for it….

Highly recommended.

WORDSMITH reviewed

Wordsmith, Volumes 1 and 2, has been reviewed by J. Andrew Byers at Tales from the Bookworm's Lair (http://bibliorex.wordpress.com/2011/11/05/book-review-wordsmith-vols-1-and-2-the-veil-of-heaven-and-the-thousand-eyes-of-flame-by-michael-r-collings/). The review is lengthy, positive, and insightful (pardon my pride at my novel being treated so nicely) and serves as both an overview of and an introduction to Wordsmith. Please take the time to look at it...and while you are there, check out Byers' other reviews and comments. Always worth a look.