{"id":153,"date":"2006-09-10T18:07:04","date_gmt":"2006-09-11T01:07:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/?p=153"},"modified":"2006-09-10T18:07:04","modified_gmt":"2006-09-11T01:07:04","slug":"midwestern-paranormal-noir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/?p=153","title":{"rendered":"Midwestern Paranormal Noir"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"TheHere’s the thing: I work as a children’s librarian, but I love to read adult lit too. But since I don’t have a lot of exposure to the review journals for adult books, I don’t always hear about all the cool new grown-up books coming out. In some ways this is kind of sad, and I wish I could make more time to peruse LJ<\/em> and PW<\/em> to see what’s happening on the other side of the library. But sometimes it results in what I like to call “happy accidents” (a phrase I borrowed from Bob Ross<\/strong><\/a>): I’ll come across an interesting-looking book, completely by chance, and get to read it with absolutely no idea what it’s about or what other people have said about it. The Driftless Area<\/em> by Tom Drury was just such an accident, and I’m quite happy about it.\n<\/p>\n

On the surface, our protagonist Pierre Hunter seems like an aimless 20-something slacker, but we learn from the first chapter that, when properly motivated, he is capable of doing the improbable. And perhaps it’s this quality that makes him the inevitable choice as catalyst for a bizarre string of actions and consequences. He is rescued from a frozen lake by a beautiful woman, and he falls in love. But Stella isn’t who she seems to be, and her appearance wasn’t an accident. A quirky cast of small-town losers and blas\u00e9 criminals is assembled, and they play out their predetermined roles with deadpan wit and a sort of resigned, philosophical grace. It’s a strange combination – the writing is spare and reserved, yet manages to incorporate some of the biggest ideas in literature: fate, love, the nature of reality, and the tenuous boundary between life and death.\n<\/p>\n

After I finished it, I let myself read the reviews. Booklist<\/em> used the phrase I grabbed for the title of this post, “midwestern paranormal noir,” which pretty much nails it – it’s exactly the sort of reality-with-a-twist that I love. And Publisher’s Weekly<\/em> refers to “Coen brothers-meet-David Lynch characters,” which is also apt – I think if you liked Fargo<\/em>, Barton Fink<\/em> and\/or Twin Peaks<\/em> (the first season), you’ll dig this. The title, if you’re curious, refers to a geographic anomaly, an unusually hilly and rough region<\/strong><\/a> of the midwest that escaped the glaciers’ path during the last Ice Age. And that’s it – I’m not going to tell you any more. Just read it and let the happy accident happen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s the thing: I work as a children’s librarian, but I love to read adult lit too. But since I don’t have a lot of exposure to the review journals for adult books, I don’t always hear about all the cool new grown-up books coming out. In some ways this is kind of sad, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adult-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blaine.org\/sevenimpossiblethings\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}