Marriage of Sticks Book

The easy way to describe Jonathan Carroll's novels is to call them indescribable. Since his strange debut The Land of Laughs (1980), he's developed his own special flavour of fantastic or magic-realist unease. The protagonists have wonderful and successful lives, glowingly described--this latest book stars a popular, high-living and attractive woman who loves her lucrative career as a rare book dealer. As always in Carroll, though, the glittering surface of Miranda's good life conceals a certain hollowness. Shocking booby-traps await her, stabs of horror and loss from unexpected directions. Small indicators of wrongness accumulate: a wheelchair-bound woman glimpsed in an impossible place on a Los Angeles superhighway, a dog set on fire, a hospice named Fieberglas misheard as "Fever Glass". Dead men and unborn children seem to stalk Miranda. At one point she notices a scene from her tragically interrupted love affair showing on the giant screen of a deserted drive-in movie theatre. Neither Miranda nor the world are quite as she believes: but when she's been openly, nightmarishly condemned for being what she is, there is for once a slender chance of renunciation and redemption. The finale is enigmatic but oddly satisfying. You don't easily forget a Carroll book. --David LangfordRead More