And the winner is...

Justin Armstrong’s Wyomings is the winner of The Lit Pub’s 3rd Annual Prose Contest and will be published in 2015.

1st Finalist:

Bestiary and Other Tales of Monsters by Matthew Burnside

2nd Finalist:

We Once Lived In Caves by Khristian Mecom

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Thank you to all who entered and gave us this opportunity to read and consider your work. We hope to host many more contests over the course of many more years, so it is exciting for us to have received such a large and impressive, wide-ranging pool of submissions right out of the starting gate. Thank you again for considering us as a possible home for your work.

A Conversation with Kate Southwood

This splendid and profound debut novel is set in 1925 in fictional Marah, Illinois. Falling to Earth swirls its way into a violent tornado that leaves the town in total destruction – with the exception of one man, his business, and his family. The author’s story of the town’s reaction to his circumstances will stun you with its elegant prose, artful construction, and emotional investment. The conundrum regarding ethical choices friends and community make in a time of crisis will supply food  for thought long after you have read the last page.

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MaryAnne Kolton: Talk a bit about your childhood, please. Happy family? Books you loved? Who encouraged you to read?

Kate Southwood: I was an oddity from the start: an only child in an Irish Catholic neighborhood in Chicago, surrounded by classmates who had two, five, even ten siblings. There seemed to be an endless list of things isolating me, turning me inward: we lived a block away from Lake Michigan, but I wasn’t taught to swim; our home was the furthest away from our parish church and school of all of my friends, and so there was no one nearby to play with; and my parents divorced when I was ten, which was still highly unusual at the time.

My parents were both professional writers and they encouraged my reading. We often read together, my parents on the couch and me on the floor in front of them, each with our own book in one hand, rummaging with the other in a big shared bowl of popcorn. We did have a small television, but it was rarely turned on. My mother, always freezing, wrapped up in her big Irish sweater and the afghans my grandmother knitted and read book after book from the heavy canvas bag we carried to and from the public library every week. My father rarely went anywhere without a paperback in his pocket, something to pull out on the bus or the “L” or while stuck standing someplace in line.

The result of their example was that I read constantly, too. I was obsessed with Laura Ingalls Wilder and C. S. Lewis, both of which allowed me to escape city life, which for me then was dreary. I read novels, fairy tales, and mythology, and when I had exhausted my own shelves, I read my parents’ childhood books and borrowed stacks of books from the library. I was even able to read in bed at night without the customary flashlight, the Chicago streetlights outside my bedroom window were so strong. I started reading English history and Shakespeare’s plays while still in grade school, and somehow managed not to stop or to pretend that I didn’t read these things when I was inevitably taunted for it in the schoolyard.

I realize now in writing this that my parents and I rarely, if ever, discussed what we read with each other. When I finished something my father had already read that he’d thought I’d like, too, it was enough to exchange a look of pleased understanding with him; meeting his eyes, already smiling with childlike excitement was its own discussion. Reading for the three of us was solitary, and as necessary as breathing. So, a happy childhood? No, I was different and my peers never missed a chance to let me know it. But in my case the cliché was laughably true: an unhappy, largely solitary childhood spent reading turned out to be the perfect foundation for becoming a writer.

MK: What led you to write Falling to Earth?

KS: The idea came to me piecemeal, the first part coming as a total surprise while I was surfing the Internet. I would love to go back to that moment and see what it was I was Googling, because somehow (and I truly don’t know how) I landed on information about the Tri-State Tornado of 1925. I started reading out of curiosity and was staggered that I had never heard of the Tri-State before. I lived just a few hours north of the path of that storm in downstate Illinois for many years, and although I’ve thankfully never been through a tornado, I have hidden from my share of them passing nearby–afternoons when the sky turned green, the air got eerily still, and suddenly I was stuffing the cat in a pillowcase and heading for the basement with a battery-powered radio.

Initially, I read about the Tri-State out of sheer astonishment, but then found myself returning to the Internet to look at archival photos taken after the storm. I also read several survivor accounts and was saddened to think that the storm had disappeared from popular memory. I remember thinking, This would make a great story, and then sort of shelving the idea because I still had a preschooler at home and didn’t have enough time to write. But the idea wouldn’t leave me alone. Around the same time I read Ian McEwan’s Atonement and was just devastated by it. I kept coming back to the idea of preventable tragedy and found myself thinking about the tornado again. By the time my youngest daughter had started first grade, I was ready to start writing: I didn’t know everything about my story yet, but I knew that I wanted a preventable tragedy to follow the unavoidable disaster of the tornado itself, and so I settled on the Graves family who lose nothing in the storm, while all around them their neighbors and friends lose something, someone, or everything.

MK: In a New York Times review, it is said of Falling To Earth: “Southwood’s beautifully constructed novel, so psychologically acute, is a meditation on loss in every sense.” Is that what your book was meant to be?

KS: I would say absolutely yes to the psychology. I’m always interested in characters’ psychology in books and movies, in what they reveal about themselves when they speak, when they are silent, when they can’t stop themselves from looking in a certain direction. I didn’t make things easy for myself in terms of my characters’ psychology in this novel, but that was part of the fun; nut after difficult nut that had to be cracked precisely and carefully. As for the novel’s being a meditation on loss, that was perhaps less consciously planned, but equally inevitable. I moved to Oslo fifteen years ago to be with my Norwegian husband, and I’ve been homesick for the States every day of those fifteen years. Obviously, I remain in touch and visit when I can, but I’m separated from family and friends, from my country, and even from my language every day. Also, the older you get, the more you end up dealing with death. I’ve lost several close family members over the last several years, and I made free use of my own pain in writing about my characters’ losses.

MK: In stark contrast, a Kirkus reviewer states: “By the time Paul finally realizes that he can’t reverse the senseless scapegoating, it is too late: His family’s sheer politeness and unwillingness to confront their detractors or one another will be their undoing. Unfortunately, all the conflict avoidance saps the novel of forward momentum, not to mention that essential ingredient of drama: the struggle against fate.” Do you care to comment?

KS: The only possible answer is that book reviews are necessarily subjective, not everybody can like every book, and I never expected everyone to like this one.

MK: Within this story, there is a confounding, almost frustrating, inability of the protagonist to see clearly what is going on around him: “It seems I’ve done absolutely everything wrong. I hauled what wreckage I could out to the burns along side the rest of them. I hardly slept those first days. I just cut wood and cut wood for coffins, I thought that was what I was supposed to do. Cut wood because people needed it. Look them in the eye and do business with them and help them to keep their dignity. I was only trying to be mindful of their pride, and now they’ve got it figured as greed.” How did you come to this?

KS: Alongside the idea of preventable tragedy, I was also interested in using Greek tragedy as a framework. In classical Greek tragedy, the protagonist suffers a downfall, which is the result of a combination of outside circumstances and personal failing, or a tragic flaw. Obviously, the tornado is the outside event that changes everything for Paul Graves, but his flaw is more complicated than that.

Part of Paul’s inability or unwillingness to see what is truly going on is simply the result of inexperience. He’s only 33 years old at the time of the storm: old enough to have established himself as a businessman and family man worthy of the town’s respect, but still mostly naïve about the unpleasant sides of human nature.

It’s important to remember that Paul is a really good guy who is universally liked before the storm. He in turn likes to be liked—who doesn’t—and can’t believe that the town’s esteem has been taken away from him. Perhaps as a way of grappling with this loss, he tries to find meaning in having been spared, and decides that because he is a good man who happens to own a lumberyard, he’s the perfect candidate to help the town rebuild, thereby regaining the town’s esteem. In the end, his inexperience and goodness conspire against him, and he simply can’t see that waiting out the town’s collective temper tantrum is not enough.

MK: A certain luminous precision defines your voice, and a cadence, if you will, that show themselves particularly well in every descriptive passage: “Lavinia thinks it will likely snow. She’s regarded these very fields often enough in winter, but always from the inside. When there was outside work for her to do on the farm in winter, she’d always hurried along and done it and saved staring into the distance for the window over the kitchen sink. The white, sleeping fields reaching out endlessly from the house, the sleeves of her old, blue cardigan pushed up for work, the click of the vegetable peeler on the slick, white ball of potato in her hand, the coffee pot and her cup still left to wash. A glimpse of Homer from the window.” Is this effect studied or do you access it naturally?

KS: This is a very hard question to answer, actually. A sort of which came first, the chicken or the egg for writers. The short answer is that this is the way I always wanted to write when I was younger, and through years and years of reading good writing, paying attention to details around me, and working hard at my own writing, I can now do it. It’s a wonderful feeling to know that the way I always wanted to express myself is within my reach. If an image or a scene comes to me, I know that I will be able to render it on the page very precisely (to borrow your word) if I give it enough time and all of my attention.

MK: In your opinion, and without giving too much away, what role does Lavinia play in this tale.

KS: In the broadest terms, Lavinia represents the past, both of the Graves family and of Marah, the town they live in. When she recalls her grandfather’s stories, she serves as a link to the time the first white settlers came to Little Egypt in Southern Illinois. She also functions as a complement to Paul’s character in that they both misread the resentment growing around them and, for their individual reasons, believe that they’ve earned better treatment than they’re getting.

Lavinia also functions as a warning about the lure of the past. She realizes it too late, but she does come to understand the harm inherent in allowing the past to get a grip on you, in elevating the past as an idyllic time, and forgetting to live in the present.

MK: What are your writing habits like? A special time and place? Music or silence? Do you carry a notebook to jot ideas in or are you the type of writer who scribbles notes on paper napkins to incorporate later?

KS: My writing habits are dictated by my daughters’ school days. Once everyone has left the house, it’s just me and the laptop. I do need silence and I have a hard time writing if anyone else is home. I often listen to music, but that seems to function as part of the silence for me; a sort of white noise that I choose according to my mood.

I always carry a small notebook, but generally prefer to just duke it out with the laptop—I find that ideas can sometimes be spoiled if I write them down before they’re fully formed. The most important ingredients for me are time and solitude. After that comes persistence. There’s no point in having a time and a place to write if you don’t show up.

MK: Are you working on a new novel?  Any hints as to subject?

KS: I am working on a new novel—the main character is a widow at the end of her life, giving her marriage a good hard look and asking herself about the life she created when, as a young woman, she made a choice between two proposals of marriage: one from an arrogant, passionate man, and one from a tender, safe man.

Being More Alarming Feels Good: A Review of theNewerYork

theNewerYork is more than just a literary magazine, it’s an aesthetic. Chuck Young, Joshua S. Raab, and the other editors are focused on exploring “new and forgotten literary forms”, and from Raab’s erasure-style letter from the editor onward, this aim is truly the focus of the magazine in full. The theme of Book III is time, which Raab elaborates upon in his afterword: “This book shows you that quick can also be deep, for it is the quality of time, not the length, that brings meaning to life.” Most of these pieces fit on one spread-open page of the book or less. Most are, yes, a quick read, but some are funny, some dark, some nonsensical, some profound.

I read Book III in one sitting, turning each page in sequence until I reached the back cover. I like reading literary magazines this way. Some other magazines I have recently enjoyed reading from cover to cover are Illuminati Girl Gang, Plain Wrap Press’s new online journal, Quarter, and a New Zealand-based journal called Potroast. I don’t like to skip around in a lit mag. Being an editor myself, I know a good deal of effort can go into selecting the order of the pieces included in the issue, and for me, to only pick and choose pieces that look pleasing to me or happen to be written by names I am familiar with would be incautious. I think Joshua S. Raab might agree with my style of reading. At the start, Raab’s letter from the editor instructs, “Read slowly to avoid complications, read entirely. You won’t like some of this work. This is intended; enjoy the various ghosts that can inhabit your thoughts.”

While I didn’t really dislike any of the pieces in Book III, several made me feel all tingly inside (which, for me, is a mark of greatness). Gideon Nachman’s “Unheralded Monsters” (made all the much more exciting by Nils Davey’s Monster illustrations) provides descriptions, hobbies, and fears of five lesser-known monsters, all created by the attendants of a make-your-own-monster themed eighth birthday party. These monsters are beautiful and strange, and they each reveal a lot about the character who created them in a very small space.

Charles Holdefer’s “The Amazing Sticking Quarter” outlines a gruesome magic trick that involves championing the insertion of a screw directly into the magician/reader’s forehead. Divided into subsections and including a figure, Holdefer’s story is essentially made up of a set of instructions, and the beauty of this piece is that you feel you are simultaneously reading about how to put together a desk from Ikea and also peering directly into the very dark soul of one single human.

One of the most exciting aspects of Book III is its inclusion of artwork, some of which is in full color, some of which are printed on different paper qualities. Some of the art is used to illustrate stories, while others stand alone. The list of artists included in the back is as long as the list of writers. A higher percentage of the artwork than the written stories gave me the tingly feeling, “Proverbs 10:22” by Stephen Lipman in particular, which used conté crayon and ink to create new meaning from a biblical passage.

While a few of the stories in theNewerYork’s Book III look like traditional stories, most are more like “Unheralded Monsters” and “The Amazing Sticking Quarter,” in that they play, physically, with the constraints of the page and work to radically manipulate them to achieve new things within the traditional format of a literary magazine (two covers, paper pages each with equal dimensions). But what is contained within Book III cannot be guessed at by its packaging. Though these writers’ formatting decisions might appear out of place in a more traditional journal, Raab and Young’s selection process sets traditionally formatted prose as the outlier, while giving the majority of the space to unexpected forms.

If for no other reason, pick up a copy of Book III because it feels good. Matte covers feel good on your fingers. Full color illustrations feel good in your eyes. Physically turning a book upside-down in order to read a story feels good. Being more alarming feels good.

Why Are We Whispering?

She is wearing all white, dirty white, her ID number written in Sharpie across her chest. “I was a very ripe peach,” she says, facing the class. “I was about to be torn open so the pit inside could spawn more peach trees.” We’re in Alabama’s only maximum security women’s prison. “That’s what it felt like when you were being born,” she says. “My girl.”

She, let’s call her Della, holds her classmates in an unwavering gaze as she tells her story. After a year teaching in maximum security men’s prisons, this is my first experience with incarcerated women. Her eyes are steady on me too, the new instructor.

“Nurse, nurse, my water broke!” she calls out, rehearsing the monologue she’s crafting for her daughter. Just a few months before, she lived at home with her four children and husband. She usually made oatmeal for breakfast. Now she’s in prison for life without parole.

When Della finishes, another student stands, faces us. Mary tells us that she can’t read or write. Her voice is soft and low, eyes to the ground. She tells us that she’d like to get married in Disneyland. That she has brain damage from being beaten so many times as a child. Then, she lifts her chin and begins strutting across the room. “One day my prince charming will walk out of the ocean,” she says, swinging her hips, extending her arm toward the cinder block wall and fixing her eyes to where her fingers point. “And oh goodness, he is fine.”

Stopping at the gas station outside town after class, I lean against the peeling bathrooms and pinch my thigh to redirect the pain burning hot in my throat, in my heart. After the two hour drive home week after week, I sit alone at home or go out to the bars and occasionally try to tell one of my friends a story — there’s this student, I start to say — but it never comes out right.

All this — these stories, their incredible importance and the impossibility I’ve encountered thus far in trying to communicate them — is running through my head when I open the new book Hear Me, See Me: Incarcerated Women Write, an anthology of short prose and poems from the only women’s prison in Vermont. Here’s a piece of the first poem I flip to, “Merely Me,” by Raven:

Why am I ‘mentally ill’?

Why are we whispering?

How come they decided ‘I am mentally ill’?

I stand up and say my name and they look my way.

I say, ‘I am not perfect, is all.’

I raise my voice and say, ‘I am a person whose feelings are topsy-turvy, is all.’

Yes, I think right away. This. Why are we whispering? I am a person whose feelings are topsy-turvy, is all.

The voices in this book are diverse. As one of the workshop leaders writes in the book’s introduction, the words inside appear as they are “originally written, candid and unedited,” allowing readers “direct access to real and immediate worlds.” In the growing body of prison literature, some anthologies showcase the polished work of a few writers, but this book presents a whole spectrum of writing:

from the nearly illiterate woman struggling to pen a couple of sentences, to the college graduate who crafts a finished piece effortlessly; from the dyslexic woman stumbling to read back what she just wrote to the wheelchair-bound grandmother who utilizes writing as a form of prayer.

This is the kind of book we need, a chorus of largely unheard voices all shouting and whispering with joy and fury, all speaking about what it is to be a human, a woman human, a woman human who is locked away in America. The writing is about the time inside and also the depth and breadth of the lives outside.

“I know what I would be doing if I was home with my family,” TH writes in “If I Was Home.”

We would all be cuddled up on my bed with a big bowl of popcorn watching Halloween movies together.

Whether I flip between pieces or read sections chronologically, I am struck by the commonalities of the subjects, our most human — love, parenthood, failure, silence, loss, pleasure, anger, desire, abuse, ego, addiction, friendship. It is through the volume of voices collected in this anthology, page after page of women writing their truths, that this book gains its most potent force.

These are not easy stories. Many disclose hardships most of us will never face.

“I’m at war with myself,” Stacy writes in “Darkness and Truth.”

Me against the world. Alone. Angry. Bitter. Harder than I should be ’cuz I’m forced to be. And maybe it wasn’t just my choices. ’Cuz I still hear their voices.

Though literature is powerful, there are kinds of suffering that nobody else will ever truly be able to understand. But it is the collection of these stories, both terrible and elegant, that starts to transcend the limitations of individual experience and open the possibility for compassionate connection. These are voices we rarely hear from, not just because they are incarcerated, but because of the racial, social, economic and educational background of most people who spend time in prison. For that very reason, they are fundamentally important. But it isn’t just who we’re hearing from on these pages, it’s what, and how, and why. Beyond all the reasons these voices are singular, they also, in some way, echo all of our stories. And they do so beautifully.

“Give me the strength, the power/ to rise from the bondage of my addiction,” Tess writes in “I am Here.” “It is me, your daughter/ I am here, in your light,” she calls out across the blank page. And we are here too, we readers. We hear you, women writers of the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility, and through your words, we see you.

Della’s daughter will not likely get to hear her mother tell her the story of her birth, her peach-seed-self blossoming into the world. I hope Mary gets to tell her Prince Charming about her plans for Disneyland one day. I’m not sure whether she will have the opportunity. These are complicated, emotionally irreconcilable losses present on many different sides. Nothing changes that. But I am grateful, very grateful, that a book like Hear Me, See Me exists, on whose pages we have the great privilege of reading the words all these daughters have chosen to share with us.

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Sarah W. Bartlett (Ed.) directs Women Writing for (a) Change – Vermont, a community that midwifes the words of women for personal and social growth and change. She also co-directs writing inside VT, a program that supports writing-based reflection and growth among Vermont’s incarcerated women. It is based on the practices of WWf(a)C-VT.

Trouble & Troubledness: A Review of Juliet Escoria's Black Cloud

One of the main reasons I read is to feel, and I definitely got that from the stories in Black Cloud by Juliet Escoria. I mean, if writing didn’t move us…why keep reading? Without emotional involvement, there is no engagement. Without engagement, we get bored and drift off. My life is boring enough. I don’t need that in fiction. However, I certainly wasn’t bored by the stories in Black Cloud. Anything but.

Of course, as one might expect from the title, the feelings (without considering the complexity with which they are evoked) are frequently unpleasant. Consider this portion from “Trouble & Troubledness” (which I certainly hope isn’t happy for you):

One day my mom yelled at me for something that made no sense and so I ran outside. The thing swirled up, the empty black thing, growing from the pit of my stomach, tendrils reaching into my arms. My vision went hot and I wanted to jump into the ocean and swim out far until I couldn’t come back.

I flicked the blade out. I wanted to make a heart in my calf. My skin got whiter as I cut, and then the whiteness filled in with blood. I carved each line three times, just to make sure it went deep enough. The blackness shrank.

I wiped the blood away with the meaty part of my palm. I licked my hand clean. It tasted like copper and dirt. My leg hurt, but I felt tough on the inside, like I could hide the thing inside me. My jeans stuck to the blood but later it scabbed over, and when the scab fell off there was a perfect and even heart-shaped scar.

Presuming you aren’t some kind of monster, the above evokes pain and horror. However, it is also powerful and moving.

After all, dwelling only on good emotions while ignoring the bad is an attempt to hide from life. It may make things nice,’ but it shuts out the vast majority of experience. It’s reductionistic and escapist. Perhaps like the main character of “Trouble & Troubledness”(if you’ll even consider excusing me for venturing to make this kind of a comparison), sometimes we just need to feel. Anything.

No, these stories aren’t primarily about joyful feelings, though there is some in there. As the section headings indicate (including: resentment, confusion, apathy, guilt, disgust, spite, revenge, fear, powerlessness, envy, self-loathing, and shame), these are principally darker aspects of human existence.

The section headings may sound a bit simplistic at first, but you still can’t see what is coming just because the supposed emotion to be involved is announced. There is more of a twist on the recited theme than that, a variation or perhaps deeper exploration. For example, one section is titled “Powerlessness” and then the story “I Do Not Question It” goes on to detail two recovering addicts, best friends and occasional lovers, who seem to both save and destroy each other throughout their history:

I was scared to drink the kava because I had never done it before and because I knew I would like it because it will change how I feel. But Zachary peer pressured me into coming here. Which is funny, considering when I had one year sober, he called me and told me he would send me heroin in the mail because he knew it would turn me into a junkie, like him. I hung up on him and started to cry. This was the last time we talked until he got clean again.

It is not fair, to Zachary, to tell you that story, with- out telling you that he was instrumental in getting me clean and helping me stay that way – despite and maybe because of the phone call about heroin. When I got sober, my thoughts would get to churning and until nothing made sense anymore. “Stop thinking,” he would tell me, so I stopped. It worked. It’s harder than it sounds but it’s easier than you might think.

The characters evidence powerlessness at times, in facing their own addictions as well as in their ties to each other, but also power over the exact same things at other times. It’s an investigation of powerlessness, but in a much more multi-faceted way than a mere dictionary definition of the term would suggest.

Regardless, using sparse and elegant prose, Escoria makes the reader feel. Moreover, even when the reader feels is terrible and frightening, Escoria finds a way to make it beautiful. These are powerful stories. Read them and be moved.

Book As Site For Inevitable-Resound: On Carolyn Zaikowski's A Child Is Being Killed

Book as catapult, as dark cliffs among which an impossible voice is being initialized, is becoming confident enough to sound.

Book as reverb in a yearn-school.

Book as site for inevitable-resound.

From a voice taken a voice is invented: Shrap. Shrap sharpens. Shrap is to shrapnel. Shrap is a profound sear along a system of seams (“Shrap imagines [] sewing her own tongue back in place while chewing the doors off the closets”).

Zaikowski’s A Child is Being Killed is a soaked-yarn-endeavor whereby a young person is sounding themselves into existence even amidst imposed violences and horrid turmoil (“I am your little girl, the understudy for the daughter you couldn’t fuck in real life”/ “The island in the middle of the tsunami is mine and it is untouched. This is the line I kept writing in my head when you were all fucking me”/”All the men with their one woman”). Shrap is a land of wounds in “time’s womb” (“I landed in a pile of myself underneath the window”).

A many-faceted dysphoria (“I refused to feel the pain”/ “There are no available selves”).

A constant ambulation.

Book as holder of a chewy story.

Chewy story chewed as a chew toy: my mouth, my own voice, are getting stronger the longer I gnaw.

In Zaikowski’s remarkable and poignant narrative, captors (Father, Corey, other men who rape or pay for use of Shrap) though inflictors, are also, at times the only other human contact (there are other contacts: rodents, ghosts, voices, images, memories) (“The things that are wrong are human things, not animal things”).

Book as page-place where the authentic gender is lived (“My penis has a clitoris”/ “My penis is nothing but a long clitoris that has fallen out of my body”/ “She wonders whether or not she is actually a king [] she has a penis and a vagina. She has other genitals you can’t conceive of. That’s why she’s so powerful”).

Shrap comes in contact with the maternal as lover and stand-in mother. Consuelo: consolation and courtship, camaraderie and confidante (“Consuelo: I love you. I love you. She replie[s], yes, I love you too, Shrap”).

Brutalization and non-consent, through reams of men, the girl in the white dress wishes for the shore on which she can be brazen on her own terms. She sounds the wish and is never seen. Through Shrap’s voice, through Consuelo, through the swells of mother visiting, a girl in a white dress is finally being seen. It is the evening after Corey’s murder. Her dress is blushing as the horizon’s red deepens, nearing some mid-way point before it goes below the land which stands in front of it. (“When I really think about it, all the dirt and earth, where it all starts and ends and goes around in circles and explodes—I want to make total love to it, I have made total love to it”).

Layers of Violence, Professionalism, Paranoia, and General Distrust: A Review of Robert Pobi's American Woman

I like strong women. I like strong female protagonists in my fiction. Robert Pobi does not disappoint with his third novel, American Woman. Alexandra “Hemi” Hemingway is a lot of things: brilliant NYC police detective, Ivy League educated daughter of wealthy parents, brutally protective of herself and those she holds close, deeply troubled, prone to violent outbursts, pregnant.

That, in and of itself, could have been the basis for a wonderful, but less exciting novel. Pobi chooses instead to move quickly away from Hemi’s internal struggles and focus on her latest case. There’s a sadistic serial killer on the loose, and he’s targeting New York’s children, cutting them up, and leaving the pieces for the police to find, taunting them with his ability to move about unseen and always be two steps ahead of them.

Hemi’s internal struggles are sharply contrasted with the need to find this killer. Not only does she have a huge decision to make regarding the life growing inside of her, one that she knows would forever alter the life she’s spent fifteen years working her ass off to build in the face of often brutal sexism, but she’s still reeling from the violent death of her boyfriend a few years earlier. A death that she avenged in a hail of bullets and blood that left six men dead and her with a few new dental implants, a reconstructed cheekbone and shoulder blade, and a partially collapsed lung. Like I said: brutally protective, deeply troubled, and prone to violence.

It would be easy to say that Hemi is an over-the-top, Hollywood rendition of a New York City detective. And it would also be accurate. The things that she gets away with, never mind survives, would be grounds for immediate dismissal of any actual police officer. She is, in the parlance of the clichéd police drama, a “loose cannon”. But I can forgive Pobi for drawing her outline in such stark and simple terms, because he is also able, amid the frustration, gore, and quickly climbing body count, to fill in that outline and make her something more than Die Hard’s John McClane with breasts. She is full of conflicting drives and self-doubts, frustration at how much harder she’s had to work for acceptance in a historically male-dominated field; she has a family that will never understand the decisions she makes, and that she is therefore estranged from. She spends what little down-time she has worrying herself sick about what it would mean for her to become a mother, to bring a child into a world that she knows all too well is working hard to take you out of it. She is human. And it is Hemi’s humanity — admittedly hidden deep below the layers of violence, professionalism, paranoia, and general distrust — that make her a compelling character.

The main plot of the novel — the finding of the killer — is pure Hollywood crime thriller. The sheer number of unexpected twists makes it improbable in reality, but Pobi builds a fictional version of the city through Hemi’s eyes that makes it believable. I admit that this was often a book I had to put down and walk away from for a while. Not because I found it hard to suspend my disbelief, but because I found myself becoming overly-affected by the violence and brutality of the killer. There were nights I lost sleep over it. Nights I found myself double and triple-checking that I had locked my doors against the night and the invisible terrors lurking in it. And I know from first-hand experience how difficult it is to write in a way that elicits that kind of instinctual response.

Speaking of Hollywood, I found myself imagining the novel projected onto the big screen as I was reading it. Mostly this was not a problem, and spoke to the author’s ability to conjure images fully-formed on the page. However, there are several times when the narrative point-of-view shifts to a different character for a chapter to show what the killer is thinking, or what one of his future victims is doing right before being abducted. In a movie, this technique can be used to great effect, building tension and offering relief from staring at the same couple of actors who are up on the screen for 95% of the film. In a novel, I personally find it distracting, and even jarring at times to be suddenly yanked out of the protagonist’s head and dropped suddenly into someone else’s. Pobi does scores extra points for being able to shift his narrative style to indicate this change in point-of-view, however.

In the end, I found myself unsurprised by the shocking revelations as to the killer’s identity and connection to his victims. But that was only because I had figured it out a hundred pages earlier from the clues that Pobi dropped throughout the story, clues that might be less obvious to a reader less familiar with the genre (or less obsessively detail-oriented) than I am. Despite this, I still found myself tensing up as I reached that final confrontation, as Hemi puts together the pieces and realizes just how terrifying this case truly is. And that’s a skill that I envy in Robert Pobi. Even though I knew the answers, I was still on the edge of my seat to see what would happen next.

And I can’t wait to see what does happen next. If this novel gets optioned for a movie, I will gladly pay $15 to go see it, despite already knowing the plot. And, if it’s made well and sticks to the source material (no guarantee in this day and age), I will be both happy and deeply disturbed by that movie. But you know what I want even more than to see this up on that screen? I want more of Hemi on the page. I want to learn more about her, to see her face new challenges with the same dogged, often self-destructive, determination that made me love her in this book. Get on that, Mr. Pobi.