Niceville by Carsten Stroud
My rating: 4/5 cats
a canadian writing southern gothic?? i am there. with bells on.
so you have a town that is smalltown, but not as inbreed-y/insular as, say, in Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone. niceville is one of those southern historically-respectful towns, with its long memory of its “four families” and the war of northern aggression, and its squinty-eyed suspicion of “the outside.” oh, and it might have a haunted lake and some native american curses at work.
it is a ghost story clomped together with a bank robbery storyline, some corporate espionage and an affronted blackmailer lashing out in impotent rage. and it is like overhearing four different conversations that eventually all come together into a novel that i found very satisfying, but others thought was “too much.”
but it’s not.
you know how infinite jest is like a million different stories all smooshed together in this wicked detailed tapestry with its damaged, unusually-named characters, but each storyline eventually affects the others in surprising ways? this is similar, and stroud even uses a couple of dfw-esque writing flourishes, which is not to say that it is as good as IJ, nor trying to be, but the way the stories react with each other is fun and pleasing and unexpected.
i mean, pay attention, because there are a lot of characters here, and there’s that “what is reeeeeal and what is ghoooostly???” thing happening, like in stephen king when he is trying. it is not a difficult book, but it is a fun and spooky read with good momentum and well-written characters.
also, a big fat cat.
