This is a darkly creepy dust storm of a book, part Stephen King and part John Steinbeck -if Steinbeck lost most of his talent. It starts as a revenge story rooted in the harsh reality of the Dust Bowl days, and transforms into a heavy-handed examination of myth.
Marcus Connelly is a good man who begins a desperate trek through the ruins of 1930s American heartland on the trail of his child's murderer. As he tracks the elusive fiend the hobos call Mr. Shivers, Connelly discovers that he's not the only person whose life the killer has ruined. Connelly gathers around him a group of like-minded desperate lost souls, with each member of the group of vagabonds loosely based on some mythic figure in the literary past. As the Dust Bowl refugees pursue Shivers through a bleak and hopeless world, they gradually realize that he is the embodiment of an elemental force of destruction, and begin sacrificing their own humanity for the sake of vengeance.
The book starts off as slow as a locomotive climbing a mountain, and never reaches the top. However, for the most part Mr. Shivers is tightly written with a great economical style almost as sparse as the landscape, even though some of the symbolism is a bit forced. I'm not surprised to discover the author is a recent university graduate. His professors probably taught him that as a "serious" author, you must have literary pretensions.
BIBLIO SAYS: Recommended, with some reservations.
Marcus Connelly is a good man who begins a desperate trek through the ruins of 1930s American heartland on the trail of his child's murderer. As he tracks the elusive fiend the hobos call Mr. Shivers, Connelly discovers that he's not the only person whose life the killer has ruined. Connelly gathers around him a group of like-minded desperate lost souls, with each member of the group of vagabonds loosely based on some mythic figure in the literary past. As the Dust Bowl refugees pursue Shivers through a bleak and hopeless world, they gradually realize that he is the embodiment of an elemental force of destruction, and begin sacrificing their own humanity for the sake of vengeance.
The book starts off as slow as a locomotive climbing a mountain, and never reaches the top. However, for the most part Mr. Shivers is tightly written with a great economical style almost as sparse as the landscape, even though some of the symbolism is a bit forced. I'm not surprised to discover the author is a recent university graduate. His professors probably taught him that as a "serious" author, you must have literary pretensions.
BIBLIO SAYS: Recommended, with some reservations.
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