Bøker av Joseph Harms

After being arrested for trespassing on his ex-girlfriend's college campus, nineteen-year-old Shannon receives a restraining order, an inveterate attack of colic and an inexplicable phone call from the Voice whose seemingly impossible promise to reunite Shannon with his unrequited love plays on a potential-suicide's willingness to try anything. Uncertain of the Voice's motives, Shannon nonetheless follows its command to leave for Europe on Detroit's next redeye. There he finds himself immersed in a religious war whose violence demands from him participation that can't be redeemed via casuistry or self-defence and whose sanctions issue from gods old and incipient. Forced to operate in conjunction with the worst of two evils, Shannon and three fellow vassals must escort a severely disabled child to Vejer de la Frontera, Spain, if they're to see the Voice's promises materialize. Written with a poetic density reminiscent of Rilke and the concinnity of Cormac McCarthy, CANT soon departs from a traditional morality tale into an inverted bildungsroman in which an escalation of alcohol and opiate intake threatens to reave the Voice's proffered rewards of significance and Shannon's attrited memory of love. As their mercenary travail is degraded into otiose bloodletting each must maintain, lose, transcend or be transpierced by the ensiform hope on which he has balanced for perhaps too long.

Cassius and Max, respectively thirteen and fifteen years old, suspect the adults of their town are part of a satanic sect that operates under the guise of Christianity. As their travels into the wilderness behind their neighborhood grow deeper, their suspicions are complicated and compounded in proportion to the narrowing divide between right and wrong. It is only through graduated treachery and induration that the best friends can hope to avoid collusion and eventual subsumption into a sacrificial world fashioned by their parents. Written with the earned nostalgia of Capote and the deft horror of Polanski, Baal tells the story of two boys whose confrontation with adult evils, both quotidian and monstrous, results in their systemic renunciation of childhood: Cassius must decide whether or not to forfeit Max's innate innocence and love to a fiat of counter-violence; while Max, more and more aware of the racial and sexual chasm that between them has always existed, must decide to what lengths he'll go for unrequited love. Both must figure a way out of the depression and alcoholism rampant in their Michigan town of laid-off autoworkers and their caged wives.