Nevermore: A Novel
Author: William Hjortsberg
Publisher: Open Road
Imprint: Open Road
Pub Date: March 13, 2012
ISBN: 9781453246597
Houdini, the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle involved in a serial killer murder mystery? Yes indeed! I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I started reading this book, but soon couldn’t pull myself out of it. I neglected chores, errands, food and just about everything else in order to finish it. I ended up finishing it at work during my lunch hour where instead of going out to get something to eat, I just dug my Kindle out of my handbag and started devouring words instead.
The story is set in 1923 and is told in alternating chapters about Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The portrayal of the time period is wonderful and fascinating, being not only Jazz Age, but darkly tinted with a hint of Gothic. I loved the characters, both such interesting ones being brought to life in this story. I loved the details. The era’s fascination with spiritualism is at the heart of the story and I loved how the author wove it in with Houdini’s history of debunking the same.
Both Doyle and Houdini are larger than life figures in both history and in this story. The author makes his characters almost step out of the page and into your room. They are that human. His characters are emotionally charged and complex creatures with hopes, dreams, and fears. The era itself is a character and one that made me dive into researching the time again, the buildings, the era itself and the characters mentioned.
The mysterious and seductive spiritualist Isis seems to embody all the mystery, fascination and danger of contacting the spirit world. She seems the personification of magic and timelessness while being just as complex and full of contradictions.
I loved the idea of Conan Doyle and Houdini teaming up as a kind of pre-CSI crime team out to solve a series of Poe-themed murders. That the ghost of Poe shows himself on occasion only makes this story more marvelously weird and wonderful.
Publisher’s blurb:
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini team up to search for a literary-minded killer
It is 1923 and a beautiful young woman has just been found outside a tenement, bones crushed, head ripped from her shoulders. A few stories above, her squalid apartment has been ransacked, and twenty-dollar gold pieces litter the floor. The window frame is smashed. She seems to have been hurled from the building by a beast of impossible strength, and the only witness claims to have seen a long-armed ape fleeing the scene. The police are baffled, but one reporter recognizes the author of the bloody crime: the long-dead Edgar Allan Poe.
A psychopath is haunting New York City, imitating the murders that made Poe’s stories so famous. To Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the killing spree is of purely academic interest. But when Poe’s ghost appears in Doyle’s hotel room, the writer and the magician begin to suspect that the murders may hold a clue to understanding death itself.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of William Hjortsberg including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.
About the author:
William Hjortsberg (b. 1941) is an acclaimed author of novels and screenplays. Born in New York City, he attended college at Dartmouth and spent a year at the Yale School of Drama before leaving to become a writer. For the next few years he lived in the Caribbean and Europe, writing two unpublished novels, the second of which earned him a creative writing fellowship at Stanford University.
When his fellowship ended in 1968, Hjortsberg was discouraged, still unpublished, and making ends meet as a grocery store stock boy. No longer believing he could make a living as a novelist, he began writing strictly for his own amusement. The result was Alp (1969), an absurd story of an Alpine skiing village which Hjortsberg’s friend Thomas McGuane called, “quite possibly the finest comic novel written in America.”?In the 1970s, Hjortsberg wrote two science fiction works: Gray Matters (1971) and Symbiography (1973). The first, a novel about human brains kept alive by science, was inspired by an off-the-cuff remark Hjortsberg made at a cocktail party. The second, a post-apocalyptic tale of a man who creates dreams, was later published in condensed form in Penthouse.
After publishing Toro! Toro! Toro! (1974), a comic jab at the macho world of bullfighting, Hjortsberg wrote his best-known novel, Falling Angel (1978). This hard-boiled detective story with an occult twist was adapted for the screen as Angel Heart (1987), starring Robert De Niro. Hjortsberg also wrote the screenplay for Legend (1986), a dark fairy tale directed by Ridley Scott. In addition to being nominated for an Edgar Award for Falling Angel, Hjortsberg has won two Playboy Editorial Awards, for which he beat out Graham Greene and Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez. His most recent work is Jubilee Hitchhiker (2012), a biography of author Richard Brautigan. Hjortsberg lives with his family in Montana.
Disclosure: A free copy of this book was furnished by the publisher for review via NetGalley, but providing a copy did not guarantee a review. This information is provided per the regulations of the Federal Trade Commission.
