Shooting the Heart

Rating:
Summary: Powerful, Brilliant, and Timely
Review: "What is hell?" asks Father Zossima in Dostoevski's "The Brothers Karamazov". "It is the inability to love." Paul Cody maps the coldest part of hell, the ninth circle reserved for those who betray intimates and benefactors, in this powerful, brilliant, and timely novel. Earl Madden, the mentally disturbed teacher whose obsession with serial killers may or may not have driven him to murder his wife Joan, is no mere clinical case. He is very much a man of this historical moment, a lost soul mourning his alienation from everything he loves in an America that glorifies and sexualizes violence. In a culture where pornographic snapshots of naked and tortured Iraqi prisoners and the footage of Nat Berger's decapitation permeates the Internet, Earl's struggles to maintain his sanity and decency will be all too familiar to most readers. His final defeat after a harrowing inner battle is both a tragedy and a warning. As Oscar Wilde noted, "Each man destroys the thing he loves. The brave man does it with a sword, the coward with a kiss." Cody tempers his novel's bleak naturalism, however, with moments of haunting lyricism, as if he were Theodore Dreiser scattering haikus throughout "An American Tragedy". Some passages demand to be read aloud. All in all, an unforgettable book from an important contemporary writer. Read it and tremble.

Rating:
Summary: A riveting, hypnotic tale
Review: This is a must read for fans of Edgar Allen Poe, Stephen King or The Sopranos. Cody's latest novel about thwarted, desperate love is elegant, creepy, beautiful, disturbing, rhapsodic and masterful in its ability to capture the essence of a lost soul. Enter Earl Madden's world, a compressed place where drifters and yearners, sadists and crumpled dreams reside. In prose that is distinctly poetic, you'll find a dissection of the human race in all its darkest glory. The marriage of violence, sex, love and death form an oceanic outpouring that is scary and wondrous down to the last aching words. Cody's creative imagination is fifty yards ahead of the pack.

Jessica Keener, Boston Globe Correspondent
Brookline, MA