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Robert Paul Blumenstein
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Pub. Date: December 10, 2007
ISBN-13: 978-1432709075
260pp
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There’s literary fiction and there's genre
fiction, and then there’s Robert Paul Blumenstein’s new novel, Snapping The String, which draws from nearly every genre out
there. The publishers blurb, “a chilling psycho-thriller,” will
definitely draw the attention of psycho-thriller fans, but what about fans of
outright horror, Southern-gothic grotesquerie, magical realism, romance,
religious fiction, Bildungsroman (albeit a uniquely belated
Bildungsroman), mystery, hardboiled detective noir,
adventure, or social commentary a la One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and
Girl, Interrupted? Snapping The
String definitely deserves an audience beyond that of the thriller
aficionado.
I like Blumenstein’s concise,
uncomplicated descriptives. Detailing Peyton
Costello’s hallucination from an acid trip (which is how we’re introduced to
our, at first impression, dubious hero), Blumenstein writes, “the walls
inflated, then deflated,0 which gave me a perfect visual, like something
surreal out of Alice In Wonderland. When Peyton releases his
distraught embrace from his dead father propped up in bed, we get a macabre
snippet any vintage King or Lovecraft lover would
enjoy, “Then his dad’s head rolled forward and fell from his neck….His father’s
head tumbled to the floor, bounced once, twice, and then rolled to a
rest.”
As bad as witnessing the gruesome
aftermath of decapitation, imagine how bad it would be being falsely
accused of murdering your parents and spending the next twenty-two years of
your life unjustly jailed at the Mid-Virginia Mental Hospital, undergoing regular
electroconvulsive “therapy” and taking so many unnecessary drug cocktails that
your average junky’s habit might look like
aspirin-therapy in comparison. Welcome to Peyton Costello’s
wasted world. And never mind that Peyton does not have a mental disorder
(that’s beside the point to the vindictive psychiaquacks
at Mid-Virginia); Peyton just better be sure he doesn’t tick off the wrong
mental health professional or she’s bound to recommend, besides a frontal l obotomy, a “Second Surgical Procedure”: castration,
because, “‘I don’t see what further use Mr. Costello has for his
gonads.’” Does Blumenstein grind his axe too sharply in his commentary of
the evils perpetrated inside psych-hospitals against mental health patients as
late as the mid 1980s? I’d say yes at first glance, but since I’ve read
so many non-fictional accounts concerning the abuses, how could I justifiably
say no? Perhaps I could say yes to, at times, the narrative feels mildly
didactic, preachy, but it’s mostly preaching to the choir.
Peyton’s surprising release from
Mid-Virginia portrayed enough drama that it could have served a viable climax
to Snapping The String, but then we’d always
wonder who killed Peyton’s parents. Blumenstein compellingly keeps us in
suspense, whizzing us first into the jungles of Belize, beloved by his father
(and where Peyton grabs a native wife, Oriana), on to
Egypt and inside the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Khufu,
where Peyton and his long-lost friend, Ishmael, discover the first real clues –
mysterious apparitions – directing them to a holy man, and to the terrible sec
ret he’s been hiding behind a bookshelf for years.
Book Room Grade
B
Book Review Posted: September 30, 2008
(Reviewed by Brent Higgins)
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