The Homecoming by Carsten Stroud
My rating: 5/5 cats
so all you motherlumpers who didn’t listen to me when i squeeed all over Niceville when i reviewed it last year are going to be SO EMBARRASSED! because the sequel is coming out, and it is a legitimate squee-quel, better than the first!!
it is such a “me” book that i am too blinded to even know who else i should recommend it to. and by “it,” i mean niceville, because if you attempt to read this one before you read that one i will slap my keyboard and pretend it is you.
i mean, it’s your life to live and you make your own choices, of course. just don’t make dumb choices. the book does a good job of dropping details from the first book in little expositional nuggets, but they are mostly for the people like me, who have read a book or two between this one and niceville and they are more like bread-crumb reminders than stand-ins for you aforementioned motherlumpers. you do it your way, you are going to miss a lot. you do it my way, and hopefully you will have the same reading experience as i had, and you will feel lit up from within with satisfaction in a well-told tale.
here are some tags for you: southern gothic, canadian author, crime fiction, ghosties, historical flashbacks, eeeeevil child, afterlife-intervention, beware the deer, bone baskets, mysterious disappearances, crimes both white-collar and otherwise, fantastic courtroom scene, drill-torture, mental asylum, mysterious reappearances, gorgeous elderly archivist, a mayaimi indian gigolo, assassins, sharpshooters, high-speed highway chase, hostage situation in a fortified survivalist store, and very hungry cats.
ohhhhh, it is my kind of delicious.
the action in this book picks up right after niceville ends, and from there, there are some time-jumps, but it mostly follows chronologically in a shortish span of time.
niceville is the kind of small town that inhabits the sleeping brain of david lynch. on the surface, it is all scenic and quaint, with its little trolly rolling through the historical district by antebellum houses and weeping willows, and a vast lake, steeped in native american lore. oh, but there is a darkness roiling unseen, and the borders between here and after-here are porous.
and on top of the supernatural presence, there is also good old human crime. one crime in particular, which has consequences that spiderweb out into four or six additional crimes, keeping the various law enforcement agencies very busy indeed.
and with all this going on, it still manages to be funny. frequently. which is something i just love, when it is successful—a book that can be creepy one moment, and then crime-thrillery, and then making me laugh all in the span of a few pages (or screens, because i am so modern now) the chapters are on the shorter side, and they all have huge-font, evocative titles like: what the military term “vertically deployed into the terrain” actually means and zero to sixty in four point three is good but sixty to zero in one is not. it is definitely a book that holds your attention.
apart from the haunted carnival fun of its plot and pacing, the characters are so very good. and nuanced—there are characters that you would expect to hate, like charlie danziger. but i just couldn’t stop myself from having a soft spot for him, long before the scene with mavis where even the most cynical reader has to forgive him. and you cannot dislike a character named lemon featherlight. you think you can, but you can’t.
there is definitely space for a third book, here. i’m not sure if he is planning on going for it, but in the introduction, there is the following quote:
“I hope Mr. Stroud, having had so much fun writing Niceville, listening to his people give him terrific dialogue, is writing a sequel or another one like it.”
and who can argue with elmore leonard? there are such mixed reviews for niceville on here, leaning over to the negative, it must be told, that i want to be very careful about recommending it, because i guess people don’t like books where there are a lot of converging storylines where awesome stuff happens. and some people like shows where people sing all the time. so, people are strange, but i loved this book, and that’s the best i can do for you.
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