2013 Book 30: Dust Devil on a Quiet Street
Book 30: Dust Devil on a Quiet Street by Richard Bowes, isbn: 9781590212974, Lethe Press, 318 pages, $18.00
The Premise: (from the Goodreads page): Dust Devil on a Quiet Street chronicles the remarkable life of Boston-born, New York City-reared author Richard Bowes. Bowes’s childhood and adolescent brushes with dramatic spirits and hustlers, large and small, paved the way for his adult encounters with the remarkable, the numinous, the supernatural. Deftly orchestrated, this “memoir” is part impassioned homage to Manhattan-decades before and up to its recent wound on September 11th, which creates a hole in the city and allows the ghosts of the dead to return-and part tell-all of the uncanny secrets behind a group of Greenwich Village writers and life as a university librarian.
My Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
My Thoughts: Rick Bowes' latest novel sits in that weird interstitial place between genres and categories. It's a memoir, but fictionalized. It's urban fantasy in the sense that New York City, and particularly Greenwich Village, is as much a character as Bowes himself and the folks he runs with, but you won't find a snarky wizard or changeling at the center of the action. It's a very subtle kind of horror, the type that doesn't outright make you jump but does settle a sense of unease on your subconscious that starts you wondering if what you just saw out of the corner of your eye was really there or not. And it's also a collection of short stories that flow almost seamlessly from one to the next to form a narrative whole (in fact, much of this material has been published in short story form in various anthologies over the past few years). In lesser hands, this random mixing of elements could be a train wreck (perhaps not the best analogy to make given the book starts with the fall of the Towers on September 11th, but work with me). Bowes sets a unifying tone of ... nostalgia? That might not be quite the right word ... that manages to meld all the components into a natural flow.
While Bowes himself is the center of the story, it's the characters around him that propel the action; very often Bowes is the acted-upon rather than the actor, and that adds a level of melancholy to the story. (It occurs to me that this could have been a very angry book, but the author chooses to look on the events with a "they happened, they shaped me, they will continue to do so" attitude rather than a "screw the world for what it did to me and my friends" one.) Many of the supporting characters could carry novels of their own. I'm intrigued by Major Barbara in particular, but also the ghosts of the now-closed St. Vincent's Hospital as well as Judy Finch, Ray Light and BD.
Bowes starts the story with the events of September 11th, and as I tweeted at the time, that first chapter had me on the verge of tears as I was reading it over dinner in a Ruby Tuesday's in Alexandria VA ... and then Ryan Adams' song "I Still Love You, New York" came over the restaurant radio and I did cry. This is the power of words (and music), and if the rest of the book never quite ellicited the same physical response from me, well, that's probably a good thing. If I'd kept crying, I'd probably have never finished the book. There are other moments though that brought other physical reactions. The hospital scenes with McKittrick brought goose-bumps, while the student suicide section made me feel just a bit queasy.
I'd say there really is something for everyone in this book, and the mosaic pieces form a satisfactory and full whole -- at least until Bowes publishes his next fictionalized memoir. (There are plenty of things he drop-mentions that should be further stories of their own.)
The Premise: (from the Goodreads page): Dust Devil on a Quiet Street chronicles the remarkable life of Boston-born, New York City-reared author Richard Bowes. Bowes’s childhood and adolescent brushes with dramatic spirits and hustlers, large and small, paved the way for his adult encounters with the remarkable, the numinous, the supernatural. Deftly orchestrated, this “memoir” is part impassioned homage to Manhattan-decades before and up to its recent wound on September 11th, which creates a hole in the city and allows the ghosts of the dead to return-and part tell-all of the uncanny secrets behind a group of Greenwich Village writers and life as a university librarian.
My Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
My Thoughts: Rick Bowes' latest novel sits in that weird interstitial place between genres and categories. It's a memoir, but fictionalized. It's urban fantasy in the sense that New York City, and particularly Greenwich Village, is as much a character as Bowes himself and the folks he runs with, but you won't find a snarky wizard or changeling at the center of the action. It's a very subtle kind of horror, the type that doesn't outright make you jump but does settle a sense of unease on your subconscious that starts you wondering if what you just saw out of the corner of your eye was really there or not. And it's also a collection of short stories that flow almost seamlessly from one to the next to form a narrative whole (in fact, much of this material has been published in short story form in various anthologies over the past few years). In lesser hands, this random mixing of elements could be a train wreck (perhaps not the best analogy to make given the book starts with the fall of the Towers on September 11th, but work with me). Bowes sets a unifying tone of ... nostalgia? That might not be quite the right word ... that manages to meld all the components into a natural flow.
While Bowes himself is the center of the story, it's the characters around him that propel the action; very often Bowes is the acted-upon rather than the actor, and that adds a level of melancholy to the story. (It occurs to me that this could have been a very angry book, but the author chooses to look on the events with a "they happened, they shaped me, they will continue to do so" attitude rather than a "screw the world for what it did to me and my friends" one.) Many of the supporting characters could carry novels of their own. I'm intrigued by Major Barbara in particular, but also the ghosts of the now-closed St. Vincent's Hospital as well as Judy Finch, Ray Light and BD.
Bowes starts the story with the events of September 11th, and as I tweeted at the time, that first chapter had me on the verge of tears as I was reading it over dinner in a Ruby Tuesday's in Alexandria VA ... and then Ryan Adams' song "I Still Love You, New York" came over the restaurant radio and I did cry. This is the power of words (and music), and if the rest of the book never quite ellicited the same physical response from me, well, that's probably a good thing. If I'd kept crying, I'd probably have never finished the book. There are other moments though that brought other physical reactions. The hospital scenes with McKittrick brought goose-bumps, while the student suicide section made me feel just a bit queasy.
I'd say there really is something for everyone in this book, and the mosaic pieces form a satisfactory and full whole -- at least until Bowes publishes his next fictionalized memoir. (There are plenty of things he drop-mentions that should be further stories of their own.)