The Captive Condition - Hardcover

Keating, Kevin P.

 
9780804169288: The Captive Condition
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0804169284 ISBN 13: 9780804169288
Verlag: PANTHEON, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

From a thrilling new voice in fiction comes a chilling and deliciously dark novel about an idyllic Midwestern college town that turns out to be a panorama of depravity and a nexus of horror.
 
For years Normandy Falls has been haunted by its strange history and the aggrieved spirits said to roam its graveyards. Despite warnings, Edmund Campion is determined to pursue an advanced degree there. But Edmund soon learns he isn’t immune to the impersonal trappings of fate: his girlfriend, Morgan Fey, smashes his heart; his adviser, Professor Martin Kingsley, crushes him with frivolous assignments; and his dead-end job begins to take a toll on his physical and mental health. One night he stumbles upon the body of Emily Ryan, an unapologetic townie, drowned in her family pool. Was it suicide or murder? In the days that follow, Emily’s husband, Charlie, crippled by self-loathing and frozen with fear, attempts to flee his disastrous life and sends their twin daughters to stay with the Kingsleys. Possessed by an unnamed, preternatural power, the twins know that the professor seduced their mother and may have had a hand in her fate. With their piercing stares, the girls fill Martin with a remorse that he desperately tries to hide from his wife. Elsewhere, a low-level criminal named the Gonk takes over a remote cottage, complete with a burial ground and moonshine still, and devises plans for both. Xavier D’Avignon, the eccentric chef of a failing French restaurant, supplies customers with a hallucinogenic cocktail. And Colette Collins, an elderly local artist of the surreal, attends a retrospective of her work that is destined to set the whole town on fire.
 
Kevin P. Keating’s masterly novel delves into the deepest recesses of the human capacity for evil.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

After working as a boilermaker in the steel mills in Ohio, KEVIN P. KEATING became a professor of English and began teaching at Baldwin Wallace University, Cleveland State University, and Lorain County Community College. His essays and stories have appeared in more than fifty literary journals, and his first novel, The Natural Order of Things, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. He lives in Cleveland.

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Into the Rural Rust Belt Dystopia
 
During the quiet hours after midnight on New Year’s Day, the ghosts of Normandy Falls, manacled like felons to the tomb, temporarily escaped the totalitarian scrutiny of heaven and the moldering prison house of death, and from the forlorn churchyard near the square and the untilled fields in the valley, they assembled under the light of a spectral moon and resolved to haunt those who had denied them love. They rose high in the blustery air, thin sheets of ectoplasm flapping like mainsails in the lashing wind, a vibration of mournful energy that the living, rest­ing uneasily in their homes after the raucous holiday parties had ended, mistook as the leading edge of a storm drafting down unhindered from the polar ice cap. Like a swirling multitude of madhouse muses, the ghosts with their baleful song inspired me to act that fateful night, and through a maze of monster hemlocks that whispered and hissed in the icy wind, they guided me into the valley and then safely back to town.
 
Just before daybreak, as the horizon began to pale, I emerged from the woods and plodded across a sloping landscape of false contours. Nothing had distance or scale. The light was flat and gray, and the wind-sculpted crusts and cornices of drifting snow quickly transformed the campus quad into an uninhabitable tundra. I felt perfectly alone and anonymous, like a lost Arctic voyager, but even at that early hour, as I battled my way toward the Department of Plant Services, I saw in one of the cracked and filthy windows a yellow light flickering in the dark­ness and knew the Gonk was waiting for me.

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Verlag
PANTHEON
Erscheinungsdatum
2015
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0804169284
ISBN 13 
9780804169288
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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Softcover