The Marriage of Sticks

Publishers Weekly:

Just as the the word "weird'' has many implications and shades of meaning, so too does the latest–weird–work by this gifted and perplexing writer. As Carroll ( Bones of the Moon ; Sleeping in Flame ) himself says, "Life has a habit of turning dark corners.'' Applied here, this observation seems an understatement: these convoluted corners are both light and dark, are many, varied and constantly challenging. Flashing back and forth in time, the story concerns the apparent suicide of filmmaker Philip Strayhorn, whose bizarre Midnight series has attained cult status. Strayhorn's best friend, Weber Gregston, a filmmaker with a more intellectual bent, is drawn into a dizzying series of events by a videotape that Philip leaves him. The wickedly imaginative twists and turns that follow are only one facet of this intriguing tale, which seems at times like a framework on which to hang a myriad of metaphysical notions. What, for instance, is one to make of a tattoo of a crow that comes alive in an airplane lavatory? Carroll's style is elegant; his writing is by turns disturbing, fey, sardonic, grim–frequently within a single paragraph. The unexpected lies at the heart of this novel, and readers seeking a provocative and stimulating–though not always easy–read will be rewarded. (Aug.)

ANNOTATION

Cult favorite Jonathan Carroll has surpassed himself with his first mainstreamnovel. After Silence is an electrifying, unforgettable novel that unfolds with the logic of a Greek tragedy. Carroll writes with uncompromising honesty about how secrets gnaw and kill when truth is just as devastating.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In his late thirties, Max Fischer is a successful cartoonist living in Los Angeles. Scarred by recent love affairs, he is cautious yet intrigued when he meets Lily Aaron and her nine-year-old son Lincoln. Lily, the manager of an offbeat restaurant, devotes her life to raising her son alone. As Max spends time with the Aarons, he falls irresistibly in love with them. The perfect mate, the perfect child – the perfect situation, since they seem to love him, too, with equal intensity. But as soon as Max moves in with the Aarons, he starts to uncover disturbing secrets about Lily. He can find no trace of her ex-husband. Worse, he discovers she has committed a crime so heinous that she has been running from the truth for years. It has been said that the heart does not know from logic. Should Max right Lily's wrong – sacrificing his adoptive family? Or should he look away from the truth? Either choice is devastating.

FROM THE PUBLISHER:

"Cullen James is a young woman whose life dictates her dreams – and whose dreams control her life." In her first dream, she found the perfect man – and the same thing promptly happened in life. Now, though, she has begun to dream dreams set in Rondua, a fantasy world of high adventure, full of tests of her courage and strength. And slowly, quietly, her dream world is spilling over into her New York City reality and beginning to threaten everything she loves in life. Her friends are gathered to help her – but even her newfound courage may not be enough.

Library Journal:

The comfortable daytime world of Cullen James gives way at night to a fantastic dream landscape in which a talking dog and a child named Pepsi lead her on a search for five magical bones. In spare but striking prose, the author of Voice of Our Shadow constructs a powerful story that traverses the two-way street between dreams and reality. Recommended. JC

...

ANNOTATION

Ian meets Death in a dream. He is promised the answer to any question. Failure to understand the answer will cost him his life. Unhappy Arlen gives up everything and moves halfway around the world and discovers the man she's been waiting for always. Terminally ill Wyatt finds that he has the ability to raise the dead. Three fates converge to ask the ultimate question–what is Death?

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Jonathan Carroll is no longer just a cult author. His previous novel, After Silence, placed this gifted and award-winning writer squarely in the mainstream. The San Francisco Chronicle raved, "After Silence is filled with people who feel as real as one's closest friends, observed with a penetrating, and sometimes brutally chilling, clarity...a taut, original work whose excellence fulfills the promises made by this remarkable author over the last dozen years." In From the Teeth of Angels, Jonathan Carroll returns to that unique literary landscape that he paves with magic and wonder. While vacationing in Sardinia, Ian McGann meets Death in a dream. Death promises to answer any of McGann's questions, but if he fails to understand the answers, he will have to pay with his life. In Los Angeles, successful film actress Arlen Ford is no longer happy living in the Hollywood fast lane. She gives up everything – her career, her house, her glamorous lifestyle – and moves to Austria, where she meets a passionate war correspondent. From the start, their relationship is all-consuming. Arlen realizes she has been waiting for this man all her life. And in Vienna, the terminally ill Wyatt Leonard suddenly discovers that he has the ability to raise the dead. How all three of these extraordinary fates converge is at the heart of Jonathan Carroll's most daring and provocative novel, in which he dares to ask – and answer – the ultimate question: What is Death?

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Bestselling author Sam Bayer is stuck. Burned out from his third divorce, bored with the formulaic rut his writing has fallen into, and unable to deliver the manuscript for which he has been paid a stratospheric advance, he is desperate for inspiration. But a chance visit to his hometown of Crane's View, New York, sparks his imagination. Soon he immerses himself in an unsolved case of murder that took place when he was a teenager – Sam himself had discovered the body of the victim, a beautiful and wild teenage girl named Pauline. At the same time he is drawn into an explosive affair with a gorgeous but seriously loopy fan with the improbable name of Veronica Lake. As Sam learns the disturbing facts about his lover's past, Pauline's murderer reappears – not only endangering Sam but putting his beloved fifteen-year-old daughter in jeopardy as well. Not knowing whom to trust, Sam has to brace himself for the truly unexpected resolution to this decades-old mystery.

FROM THE CRITICS. Library Journal:

Popular fiction writer Sam Bayer is in a slump, without a single idea for his next book, and both his publisher and his agent are breathing down his neck. On a whim, he visits his boyhood hometown, a small place in New York, and encounters an idea for a nonfiction workhe will write about the murder of Pauline Ostrova, whose body he discovered floating in the Hudson when he was a high school boy. When he shares the idea with an intriguing woman, a fan of his, improbably named Veronica Lake, he unleashes a series of events that bring the old murder back into the open, setting off the killer again. Carroll's (Panic Hand, LJ 12/96) book is strung like a piano wire whose surprising final note only sounds on the last page. Stephen King has aptly compared Carroll to Alfred Hitchcock. This novel is sure to find a wide audience and will be in demand by Carroll's rabid fans. Recommended.David Dodd, Santa Cruz Cty. Lib. Sys., Cal.

First appeared in June 1992. For the personal use of those who have purchased the ESF 1993 Award anthology only.

ANNOTATION

An American ex-patriot in Vienna saves a woman's life only to place it in greater danger by falling in love with her.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Walker Easterling is a retired actor turned successful screenwriter living in the Vienna of strong coffee, fascinating friends, and mysterious cafes. When he falls in love with Maris York, a beautiful artist who creates cities, his life becomes alive in fantastic and unsettling ways. As Walker's love for Maris grows, his life gets more and more bizarre – he discovers he can see things happening just before they happen, and at the same time feels an incredibly strong tug from his past – so a friend steers him to Venasque, an odd little man reputed to be a powerful shaman. Venasque helps Walker discover and unravel his many interconnected past lives, and it is soon clear that an unresolved conflict from these past lives has resurfaced, and now threatens to undo Walker and Maris's love.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Have you ever loved a magical book above all others? Have you ever wished the magic were real? Welcome to A novel about how terrifying that would be.

Schoolteacher Thomas Abbey, unsure son of a film star, doesn't know who he is or what he wants–in life, in love, or in his relationship with the strange and intense Saxony Gardner. What he knows is that in his whole life nothing has touched him so deeply as the novels of Marshall France, a reclusive author of fabulous children's tales who died at forty-four.

Now Thomas and Saxony have come to France's hometown, the dreamy Midwestern town of Galen, Missouri, to write France's biography. Warned in advance that France's family may oppose them, they're surprised to find France's daughter warmly welcoming instead. But slowly they begin to see that something fantastic and horrible is happening. The magic of Marshall France has extended far beyond the printed page...leaving them with a terrifying task to undertake.

For connoisseurs of the strange and fantastic, a new book by Jonathan Carroll is something to be both anticipated and savored. Ever since the publication of his celebrated first novel, , he has been delighting readers with his uniquely quirky characters and overflowing imagination. Authors such as Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Ruth Rendell, and Pat Conroy have praised his work over the years. He creates worlds just around the courner from our own everyday lives, where the dead sometimes speak, where your best friend is transformed into something no longer human, or wher eyou canmeet earlier—and later—versions of yourself.

From the moment a three-legged dog limps into the comfortable life of Police Chief Frannie McCabe and drops dead at his feet, McCabe finds himself thrust into a new world of unaccountable miracles and disturbing wonders. The small town of Cran'es View, New York, has long been a reassuringly familiar place for Frannie, a haven full of small comforts and domestic harmony, but now he finds himself afflicted by strange and inexplicable omens, such as a mysterious, multicolored feather that keeps insinuating itself into his past, present, and future, all of which now converge to throw Frannie's once ordinary life into doubt. Like it or not, Frannie has come face-to-face with the uncanny, and what he does over the next few days may have uncanny, and what he does over the next few days may have unforseen consequences for the entire world.

A rich stew of intrigue, wonder, and redemption, is Jonathan Carroll's most ambitious and visionary work to date.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Voice of Our Shadow is the most frightening novel I've read since Bram Stoker's Dracula. I thought it was a love story, and it was. Then I thought it was a ghost story, and it was, sort of. Then I thought it was a story of madness, and it might be, maybe. It is a cunning, magical, wonderful novel – funny, sexy, sad, and tender."

– PAT CONROY author of The Great Santini and The Water Is Wide

Outwardly, Joseph Lennox is an ordinary young man, raised in a New York suburb and striving to make his way as a writer. Yet for him Vienna is not just one of the lures of Europe but a refuge in time and place, a refuge from a tragedy in his boyhood in which he played a far more complicit role than anyone realized. Joe's overbearing older brother, Ross, taunted him as they played near a railroad and touched the third rail, dying instantly. But he lives on in Joe's lonely guilt and dreams.

Now, in Vienna, Joe finds friendship with the strangely mantic Paul and India Tate, and their destinies soon become erotically – and ominously – intertwined. Once again Joe is haunted by the specter of betrayal and death. In the end he must face the horrifying realization of how fragile is the barrier that separates the demons of our own conjuring from the inescapable reality of the unseen.

Jonathan Carroll's first novel, The Land of Laughs, was dubbed by The Washington Post an "intricate, challenging, ultimately chilling tale." Voice of Our Shadow, in its imaginative power and delineation of terrifying pursuit, will be seen as an even greater achievement.