Friday's Forgotten Books: FRIDAY, August 8, 2014

Forgotten Books: A Hidden Place by Robert Charles Wilson

In the course of a year I usually read twenty or twenty five novels that impress me. Some for characterization, some for story, some for milieu. But I rarely read a novel that astonishes me.

When Robert Charles Wilson's first novel A Hidden Place appeared as a Bantam paperback original in 1986, I wasn't sure what to make of it. I received it along with three or four other science fiction Bantams. I think I put it on the bottom of the stack. The other novels were by writers I knew. Whatever reluctance I felt vanished when I read the first page.

The story here concerns a young man named Travis Fisher who is sent to live with his aunt because his mother, a troubled woman, has died. What he finds in his aunt's house is an intolerable uncle who demands that Travis lives by steely rules he himself frequently breaks. He also finds Anna, the strange beautiful woman who boards upstairs. Travis is so stunned by her he can barely form sentences. He also takes up Nancy Wilcox, a smart, witty girl who is bursting to escape the brutal social order of this small town.

Parallel to this story line is the one of the odd hobo Bone. Because the novel is set in the worst years of the Depression, Bone becomes our tour guide, showing us exactly how people of various kinds behaved during this time. Bone is a transfixing figure, as mysterious as Anna and perhaps linked to her in some way.

I don't want to start listing plot twists here. All I'll say is that each is cleverly set up and magnificently sprung on the reader. What I'd rather talk about is the writing. In the course of reading A Hidden Place, I heard many voices--among them Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner and the Theodore Dreiser who wrote An American Tragedy. The irony is that Wilson is a Canadian. He may or may not have read any of these writers. But except for John Steinbeck, I've never read place description to equal the power and poetry of Wilson's shantytowns or railroad goons; nor have I encountered a better picture of the small towns of that era.

But most of all the book is about people. Wilson's characters will take up permanent residence in your memory. So many of them ache for things they can't have, for things they don't even understand. Wilson writes with a razor.

Twenty years later we find that Robert Charles Wilson is a highly regarded science fiction writer, winner of many awards and several lengthy studies. I believe I've read every novel he's published. But much as I love them I always go back to this one. In its sorrows and its griefs and the beauties of its writing, we find a rare kind of truth, a statement about what it means to be human.

Ed Gorman is the author of the Sam McCain and Dev Conrad series as well as dozens of other books. You can find him here. 

AUDIOBOOK: SELECTED SHORTS: WHODUNNIT (Patti Abbott)

The six stories, each about thirty minutes, in this audiobook entertained us on a drive last week. DISC 1 has stories by Dashiell Hammett and C.S. Montanye, both disappointing. The second disc had stories by Ed McBain and Louise Erdrich, both good. But the third was the winner with a fantastic story by Shirley Jackson and another by Nadine Gordimer (Country Lovers)

The Jackson story, THE SUMMER PEOPLE told the story of a couple who decide to remain at their summer cottage a month longer and the fate that befalls this decision. Jackson uses the trivial and banal to great effect until she zeroes in in the horrific. Just makes the hair on your neck stand up.

All of the stories were apparently read to a live audience and recorded as part of a series. The readers were all good but there was a distance between you and them that the average audibook doesn't have.

Best line though. "Why don't we kill somebody?" she suggested. She was a blond, of course, tall and willowy. From McBain's "IMPROVISATION".

Sergio Angelini. MY FRIEND, MAIGRET, Georges Simenon
Yvette Banek, MIDNIGHT CROSSROAD, Charlaine Harris
Joe Baron, ROLLING THUNDER, Chris Grabenstein
Brian Busby, HE LEARNED ABOUT WOMEN, Ted Greenspan
Bill Crider: SHOOT THE PRESIDENT, ARE YOU MAD? Frank McAuliffe
Martin Edwards, HE COULD NOT HAVE SLIPPED, Francis Beeding
Curt Evans, DOROTHY SALISBURY DAVIS
Rich Horton, SCARAMOUCHE, Rafael Sabatini
Jerry House, THE DEVIL IN SCOTLAND, Douglas Percy Bliss
Randy Johnson ENTER THE SAINT, Leslie Charteris
Nick Jones, UNSUNG ROAD, Simon Harvester
George Kelley, MARTIAN QUEST, Leigh Brackett
Margot Kinberg, THE ANATOMY OF DEATH, Felicity Young
Rob Kitchin THE SPELLMAN FILES, Lisa Lutz
B.V. Lawson, THE CAPE COD MYSTERY, Phoebe Atwood Taykor
Evan Lewis, THE MEDICINE MAN, W.C. Tuttle
Steve Lewis/ Willam F. Deeck, THE GHOST IT WAS, Richard Hull
Todd Mason, ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS: STORIES BY MOTHER NEVER TOLD ME
Robert Arthur
J.F.Norris, COME AND BE KILLED, Shelly Smith
James Reasoner, EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS: MASTER OF ADVENTURE, Richard Lupoff
Richard Robinson, THE DOOMSTERS, Ross Macdonald
Gerard Saylor, THE MOONSTONE, Wilkie Collins
Ron Scheer, HIGH WATER, Richard Bissell
Kevin Tipple/PAtrick Ohl, THE MERRY HIPPO, Elsbeth Huxley
TomCat, TENANT FOR DEATH, Cyril Hare
Prashant Trikannad, THE WHITE FRUIT OF BANALDAR, John D. MacDonald
Zybahn, SPACE MOVIES, Peter Haining