I went on a Stewart O'Nan spree when I first discovered him. I started with Prayer for the Dying, which appealed to me at first due to its plague theme. (Do you know anyone else who regularly reads the Weekly Morbidity and Mortality Report?) But what a ride! Nail-bitingly suspenseful, inevitability worthy of Shakespeare's tragedies, haunting, eerie cover art - and it made me cry too. I don’t think a book has affected me so much since, except for Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. (And since both books deal with similar themes – mainly, the often futile battle against inexorable evil - that doesn’t surprise me.)Then I tackled Snow Angels. Very good as well, a little less polished, a bit more teen-angst-y due to the age of one of the main characters, a completely different book, but the same spare, elegant writing and gripping storytelling.
Wish You Were Here was gentler and not as focused, but more involved with characterization.
I was wowed by my find, but for some reason didn’t follow through by ordering from Amazon, or the library, the rest of his novels. However, I was recently thrilled to stumble over his newest, Songs for the Missing, at a dashing visit to my library last week. It boasts all of O’Nan’s usual detailed but natural storytelling, compelling characters whom we get to know almost uncomfortably well throughout the book’s course, and an occasional plot twist that you never see coming but that makes all the sense in the world. O’Nan doesn’t write thrillers, or police procedurals, but I often perceive those elements in his novels.
Of course, due to total lack of sleep and consequent brainlessness, I have set aside Songs, just for the moment, in favor of rereading Book 4 of the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn. It just goes better with the Cherry Cordial Hershey Kisses I have been snarfing down in a spate of what I like to refer to as “survival eating.” When my brain functions return to their regularly scheduled efficiency, I will pick up Songs again. And now I have to go, because I am This. Close. to experiencing brain bleed from the now-healthy, perkier-than-ever, and endlessly nattering three-year-old.
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*Joseph Conrad (Did you know Conrad wrote his brilliant novels in his THIRD language? I consistently find this fact utterly amazing.)
