The ghosts that lie within us all can steal our breath and steal our a part of our soul. The ghosts of our past, who remain such an inexplicable part of our present, can haunt us without the remorse of knowing they are doing such. The ghosts of memories can trap our hearts so that they can no longer grow beyond that time when they were actually permanent fixtures of our existence. Breathing out those ghosts can be something that only some of us can accurately perform.

The Review:
Title: Breathing Out The Ghost

Author: Kirk Curnutt

Author’s Website: www.kirkcurnutt.com

Publisher: River City Publishing

Publisher’s Website: www.rivercitypublishing.com

Type: Fiction

Number of Pages: 329 Hardback

ISBN #: 978-1-57966-070-3

This book is haunting, and that’s not a PUN just for the sake of this review. This book remains with you long after you complete it. The subject matter of this book is not for the light-hearted nor for the parents who cannot imagine the unimaginable. I am a mother and nothing could be more horrific to me than losing my child to an abductor or a murderer. I am not sure that even the most imaginative and insightful of authors can fully expose the complete, warped, and evil insanity of a child molester, although Curnutt comes very close in this chilling tale. He is a thought-provoking writer who has built characters of enormous depth in Breathing Out The Ghost. But, in my mother’s eye… the one that lies in the deepest part of my soul… the crazed thought process of a sick lunatic can never be fully communicated without our ability to actually crawl into that shell of a deranged mind and hear its inhumane thoughts.

The characters in this story are different than those you would most likely meet in your every day life… or, at least for me. They say, “A parent should never have to bury their child.” I believe that, but wonder, “what if?” What if one of my precious babies was hunted, hurt or killed? I don’t think that I could bear to live on without the undying desire to enact revenge, although the Lord of my heart would forbid me to do so. But, what if?

This book leaves me knowing its characters and understanding their motives. Breathing Out the Ghost is a story that I will not soon forget and most likely not forget. The summary of the book describes itself as:

“Colin St. Claire is on a dangerous mission. His young son is missing and he is on a self-appointed quest to find the boy, or at least the man he believes is responsible. Fueled by amphetamines and a profound lack of sleep, Colin’s road soon dissolves into such an uncontrollable spiral of blurry white lines, of fleeting forms in the night and ghosts of memory as intangible as vapor, that he degregates into a self-professed “Ahab of the Interstates.”

-and-

“In the shape of a noir thriller, Curnett fashions a gripping tale of the consequences of unchecked grief, of painful truths hidden as though they were dark secrets, and what salvation remains possible for good people who descend into the darkness and become the very ghosts they find themselves pursuing.”

I could no better describe the premise of this novel than what is written above. There is a more than one main character to this this story and each of them has a tremendous hurdle to overcome, emotionally. Not all of them make it over. I best relate with Sis, the mother of Patty, who was stripped from her life by a brutal, senseless act with no reason nor explanation. Sis and her husband Pete are forced to face the remainder of their lives with this enormous gaping hole in between them. How they deal with their marriage and family is something that I can understand, however cannot relate to. The pain must be unbearable…. the pain of losing what your love has created. Does that loss rip apart the love that it was created from? I don’t know, and thankfully, my children rest safely under my roof.

Unlike other books that I’ve read which give readers a glimpse into the mind of a child molester, this one chilled me to the bone and I’m at a loss of words to explain to you why. I suppose, there are people that can be blamed when looking at “why” these murderers and molesters do such unspeakable acts. I recognize that some of the sicknesses developed in these people are created by their parents themselves. There is just such a lack of morality in the demise of such evil-doers and I pray that the advancement of civilization does not stifle the growth of spirituality and God’s presence in the human spirit. Where is God in this? As parents, I suspect it’s our duty to ensure that God remains in our families to protect our children. It’s such a clique, but… you need a license to own a dog or drive a car… but, not to have a baby? It’s absurd what some parents do to the fragile minds of their children. Enough said.

Curnutt… he is owed much more in my review than my questions about why this happens in today’s world. He is owed my accolades for writing with such intricacy and wisdom. He is, simply, an EXCELLENT writer. People, I’m sure, spend lifetimes trying to find the words that seemed to have eased right on out of Curnutt’s pen. At times, I was re-reading portions over and over again to get the wealth of understanding just one sentence. He was born to be a writer.

Poignant Quotes of the Book:
“It’s funny. Back then I would have given everything I owned-which, obviously wasn’t much-for a little peace of mind. Now I’ve lost all I ever wanted, and I’m afraid to sleep. I’m afraid to even rest my eyes for fear of what I might miss.”

“Wind is a sound without shape, another ghost, another claustrophobia. There are so many now, I run into them, headlong, all the time.”

“Yes, it was once quite nice to think shallow people had it easy. No needs, no wants, no problems. And that we, by contrast, were special because-why? Because we could never settle, could never compromise. Perpetual disappointment was a sign that the needles of our machinery were more finely tuned. It meant we were more sensitive. Like a seismometer, we were privy to those faraway vibrations lessor folks could never detect.”

“I suppose I knew it would end up this way. I could feel him growing out of my brows, bleeding out my skin. His kisses blistering mine. I could feel me becoming him. I didn’t want to. I wanted my life to toe a line. Your love was the line I wanted to toe.”

“They were fallen because they were doomed to be felled. And they were felled because they couldn’t accept that they were fallen.”

Interview Questions With the Author:
1. What prompted you to write on the subject matter of child abduction? How did you find the ability to reach the depths of despair and grief that the characters were facing?



Years ago I read a Vanity Fair article about the parents of Etan Patz, who was probably the first famous modern missing child (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etan_Patz). At the time of the article it had been twelve years since he disappeared; come this May it will have been thirty. I was struck by the dilemma his parents faced: how to soldier on hope against hope that their child was still alive when time seemed to be conspiring against them. Their struggle seemed a deeply human example of the larger question of how we all grieve, and where on the continuum between stoic resolve and melodramatic despair an individual might fall. There have been a slew of books inspired by the Patz case. I read a few just out of curiosity but somehow felt dissatisfied by them—not because they weren’t great books (most of them were), but because I never felt the authors examined what a missing child means to us on a deeper, more symbolic level—how it evokes in us a fear of absence, whether of family, control, or even God. The situation also promised an opportunity to really explore character, which is what about fiction interests me, much more so than plot or politics. I made a decision early on that I wanted to do Ghost in a way that forced the dramatis personae to confront their flaws as opposed to sentimentalizing their heroism. I’ve had enough grief in my own life that I felt reasonably capable of getting to the thick of their fallenness. Plus there’s a little secret ingredient called empathy. It allows a writer to create people not to judge or justify them, but to lend a certain poetic dignity to their brokenness. We’re all broken in our own way, and it’s only by thinking of how others are that we avoid obsessing over our own state.



2. Your great-grandmother was Edna Parker, the oldest documented person in the world. My condolences to you and your family on your loss as she has recently passed away… she made headlines worldwide. I believe that you provided a tribute to her in your book by penning the character Ethel after her. One of my favorite parts of the books is the one in which you provided a scene in which Ethel is living with her ghosts and remembering her life. From your website, I see that you were able to share with her your published work. Were you able to also share with her that a character in your book was based on her?



Thank you for noting Edna’s passing. She left us this past November 26, the night before Thanksgiving. It took my family by surprise, as odd as it sounds, because we were so accustomed to her being with us that plans were already in the making for her 116th birthday, which she would have celebrated this coming April 20th. I always knew if I was ever be lucky enough to publish a novel, I would set it in that area of central Indiana—the farmland between Franklin and Shelbyville—that my mother’s family was from. Every writer has a setting he wants to believe is the sole property of his imagination, and that place is mine. At some point when I realized what the fact of my great-grandmother’s living so long could add to the story of endurance I was trying to tell, I thought it would be neat to include a character based on her in the book. As fantastic as it is to have lived 115 years, the reality is that it is also a lonely journey because you watch so many of your contemporaries go before you. Edna, for example, not only outlived her two sons, but she was a widow for nearly 70 years. My mother was kind enough to give her a copy of the book after I did a signing in April 2008 at a great indie bookstore in Shelbyville called Three Sisters (http://www.threesistersbooks.com). Edna was delighted that I based a character both on her and my other great-grandmother, Vivian Eberhart, who passed in 1995. She always knew me as the little oddball who goofed around with the typewriter whenever he visited the farm, so she was happy that I’d finally managed to harvest something out of that playing.



3. Kirk, how long did it take you to write Breathing Out The Ghost? How many “re-writes” did it take? How did you feel when it was published and breathed to life?



It took a lonnnggg time to do the book. About 17 years from conception to publication, to be honest. A lot of that time was spent not writing. I simply didn’t have the ability until I was nearly forty to do the novel. I wrote a lot of other books to get to that point—academic studies, articles, stories, etc. About once a year I would pull out a draft and work on a paragraph and say, “Nope—not yet.” Then somewhere around 2000 I managed to complete a draft. I had a major publisher express interest but ultimately decline it, so the manuscript kicked around about five years before a great indie press called River City Publishing was kind enough to pick it up. Then it was another two years to get it out. Along the way it came close to winning a couple of creative-writing contests. All told there were about six drafts over those six or seven years. I would add characters, develop others, cut unnecessary ones. Originally there were even more subplots. At one point I had several chapters about a new type of methamphetamine that had burst on the scene in Michigan in the early 1990s—it had nothing really to do with the main story, so it had to go. Throughout the entire process, I struggled with both the beginning and ending. I was fortunate to work with a great editor, Jim Gilbert, who helped me block out the structure and talk me through my own dissatisfactions. There was one point where I was really blocked and he said, “Just break the timeframe if you want and jump forward ten years.” It was a great experience to be entrusted with that kind of freedom. When I wrote the final draft, I finally felt as if I’d really captured what I was going for. If I hadn’t, after 17 years, I never would have.



4. When and where do you write? To the words come to you with ease, like a spirit that whispers in your ear? Or, is it more of a labored process that takes you digging into the mind of a fictional character?



I usually try to write early mornings, beginning at five a.m. or so. I have what’s called a “hidden room” in my house that I sneak up to. I like to imagine I’m a farmer who has to get up before dawn to milk the Guernseys. That’s not the greatest of analogies because it makes it sound like I have a cow for an imagination, but still.… the only way you ever get better at writing is through the discipline of routine. I’ve known writers who can crank it out as if they’re simply channeling a ghost, but that’s never been my experience. It’s always been a labored process, if only because I think of myself as a stylist—I like the poetry of the language, the intricacy of rhythms, etc. Plus it takes a lot of time to come up with characters whose motives are maybe counterintuitive. Because there’s nothing worse than inventing a protagonist or antagonist whom readers feel they’ve met before, especially when they’ve met them before in somebody else’s books.



5. What recommendations can you give to other writers who aspire to make their dreams come true in writing that one great novel?



The best advice is to develop a work ethic and stick with it. Out of the 17 years it took me to do Breathing Out the Ghost, a good 15 of them were spent convinced I would never get the book published. I always knew I would eventually write it, but, as I said before, it was a matter of getting the ability so that I could. It took a lot of practice. Once you’re at the point where you do feel you can draft a book, you should give yourself a daily page minimum. In my case, that was (and remains) two pages a day. That sounds easy until you actually have to do it. Still, with a minimum you can sort of target a completion date, and that makes a project so much more “real” than saying someday I’ll write a novel.



Thank you, Sheri, for allowing me to visit A Novel Menagerie. And I thank you readers for coming here as well. Blogs such as this are the future of the publishing industry—it’s a great space for readers and writers to talk as if we were sitting in a café in Paris.

On Sher’s “Out of Ten Scale:”
This book is unlike most other fiction books that I read. It is riveting and a “fictional thriller,” for lack of a better description. This book is extremely well-written and is extremely thought-provoking, especially for parents. For the genre of what I will call “Fiction: Psychological Thriller,” I give this book a 10 out of 10.

Add: On the Library Thing & Amazon.Com Rating: ♥♥♥♥♥ ( )

Colin St. Claire lost his son. Kidnapped. There was no resolution for him because there was never a body found. All St. Claire had was a suspect and the ghost of his son. Following his ‘whale,’ St. Claire goes off on a speed fueled mission to find his son and punish the man he thinks did it. Following him is an ex-detective named Heim who can’t seem to let St. Claire go just as much as St. Claire can‘t let go of his son. Sacrificing his own family and his own career, Heim is determined to save St. Claire even if St. Claire won’t save himself. Mixed into this is a woman they both come to know, a woman named Sis Pruitt- paths crossing and connecting by the experience of pure and plain suffering- who too lost her daughter Patty when she was murdered. The subject matter isn’t something that can be shaken away or read with a light heart.

Curnutt’s masterful use of description and language is almost poetic. Yet, instead of beautifying the story and masking the horror of what has happened, it only illuminates the darker context under which every one and everything moves and works. Time and time again I caught myself rereading passages, sometimes just because I like how they sounded and sometimes because I wanted to absorb the words into myself. I wanted to understand what was being said and try to feel every bit of it because it was so plainly written. Underneath the prose is something so harshly true to life that it sinks into you. You realize as you read it, “this is really how we are and think.” Only, we don’t often delve that deeply into our nature to find out.

Breathing Out the Ghost tells us how people cope. Or rather, how unrealistic an expectation it is for us to expect people to move on after tragedy, as well as how people function and react in unique ways. It’s about pain and obsession and destruction and failed attempts at redemption. This book exposes how we think and feel about tragedy, both those who experience it and those who witness it as outsiders. I came to see through reading this book that we all are more comfortable assuming that life goes on. Yet, the truth of the matter is that it’s not so easy. Time and time again I found myself frustrated with St. Claire. He was selfish to think that his quest was not hurting anyone or that his pain was larger than other people. But isn’t it also selfish for people to assume that he should let go and move on? Who was I to judge him? It was all very painful to be a part of, but not in a way that made me want to close the book and avoid picking it back up.

This book offers absolutely no resolution. I don’t say that to criticize. At the end of the book, no one has found peace. Curnutt doesn’t try to create drama so that he can fix it and leave his readers with a warm and fulfilled feeling at the end. The drama is the story itself and reflects the hard truth of reality: sometimes there is no end, there is no peace, there is no happiness or light at the end of the tunnel. Sometimes all that there is at the end is just more wandering and wondering, tediously carrying forward for each day. ( )

Colin St. Claire's son AJ is missing. Snatched from outside a store, the child seems to have disappeared into thin air. St. Claire is on a mission to find him and get revenge against the pedophile he holds responsible for the abduction. He travels the midwest fueled by obsession and a constant supply of amphetamines, hopping from town to town where other children have also gone missing.

But first thing's first. I've got to find a boy. If not my own, any will do. - from Breathing Out the Ghost, page 221 -

Private detective Robert Heim is also obsessed...not so much with finding AJ, but with bringing St. Claire home to his wife. His misplaced sense of duty not only loses him his license to practice as a detective, but it puts his own fragile marriage in jeopardy.

He was moved by something bigger and deeper and of his own - a sense of anger, revenge, righteous defiance. Heim knew he had to get that out before it ruined his life. - from Breathing Out the Ghost, page 289 -

Beverly "Sis" Pruitt is battling her own ghosts. She still mourns the murder of her eldest daughter seventeen years before, and the anger and grief of that loss ignites when a little boy named Chance disappears along the creek in her town.

Anger with an aim. She wasn't just scaring random sparrows. She hadn't forgotten or let go of her pain. She was doing something with it. - from Breathing Out the Ghost, page 131 -

All three characters are brought together in Kirk Curnett's dark psychological thriller Breathing Out the Ghost. As the story progresses, each character must face his or her own demons and come to terms with not only the ghosts of their past, but the pain of loss which cannot be reconciled.

Curnutt writes with a razor sharp edge - drawing out the inner workings of his characters and revealing their fears, fantasies, anger, and grief. As St. Claire's delicate grip on reality begins to crumble, the reader begins to dread what may lie ahead. But it is not just this character's mental instability which creates the tension in the novel, there is also the interplay between Sis and her farmer husband (who is more comfortable denying the existence of his dead daughter than holding her memory), as well as Heim's seemingly unstoppable self-destruction.

Breathing Out the Ghost is a novel about loss and obsession; memory and denial; and moving forward vs. falling down. Curnutt writes the book from multiple points of view which allows the reader to fully understand each character's motivation and struggle. I was surprised by this book - one which on its surface looks to be just another novel about a missing child. But behind the basic plot is a deeper story - one which examines the difficulty in remaining human in the face of unspeakable tragedy.

Highly recommended with a caution - this book involves difficult subject matter and sometimes graphic descriptions. For some readers, this may be a deeply disturbing novel. ( )

How would you react if you lost a child? What is the appropriate reaction for a parent who has lost a child? These are the questions tackled in Breathing Out the Ghost. Moving on after a child has disappeared or murdered is unimaginable, but life does move on; but how it moves on is up to the family impacted by these tragedies.

"From inside the cab of the combine, Pete watched the reels of the header bat down row after row of soybeans. As the stalks fell backwards, their stems snipped clean by a line of saw teeth on the header's bottom cutter bar, the bean pods scratched against the metal of the machinery, making the sound of a whisking broom on carpet." (page 244)

This passage signifies how both Sis and Pete Pruitt and Colin and Kimm St. Claire tackle their grief and pick up the remnants of their lives. The process of rebuilding is a series of fits and starts and restarts; it's not pretty and it's never complete. Like the stalks cut down in this passage, lives are halted and lives are skinned raw. While Sis and Pete continue with their lives as best as possible and become a source of selfless comfort for others hit by tragedy in their town, Kimm is left to her own devices when her husband Colin, who calls himself a modern Ahab of the highway, sets out on a journey to find their lost son, A.J. Both stories are separate and connected, but only begin to intersect when St. Claire finds Sis Pruitt at a local fair where she and her group, Parents of Murdered Children, share their photo quilt.

Each of these characters expresses their loss in different ways, but it is more than loss that permeates the pages of this novel. The inability to control life is most evident in St. Claire's actions, but it peeks out from behind Sis' veil of normalcy as well. When Sis works with her community members to provide food for volunteers searching for a lost boy, she loses herself in the kitchen conversation, almost fooling herself into believing she's normal. It's only when she expresses herself and her memories of her dead daughter, Patty, that she realizes normalcy is not hers.

Curnutt's masterful language and description in this novel paints a vivid Midwest landscape in which these characters languish in their grief and flourish in spite of that grief. From Michigan to Indiana, readers will picture the asphalt highway that becomes St. Claire's home, office, and escape and the Pruitt's farm that provides them with order in a town where they feel they have been branded by the murder of their daughter.

One of the best passages in this book is found on page 219, where St. Claire is recording his thoughts on cassette tape for his lost son:

"When I see myself I don't see anything organic, anything original. I steal my aphorisms from outside sources. My actions pantomime the exploits of others. I'm all imitation, a gloss of a citation. Somewhere along the line I began compiling myself from the excerpts of better men."

Many of these characters are looking for ways to fill the holes inside them left by loss. And this novel is not just about the loss of loved ones; it is a novel about losing oneself in that loss, allowing it to swallow you whole. The introduction of Sis' grandmother, Ethel, who has dementia, is a nice addition to the cast. Not only has she experienced the loss of loved ones, but also her own memories and sense of self. However, she is less tortured by that loss, as she is not bound by time lines or turning points that she would like to have a chance to do over. Regret and a lack of control over life can sometimes be more powerful than actual loss. While there are some graphic details involving sexual predator Dickie-Bird, St. Claire's mythical white whale, this novel is an insightful look at grief, family, and perseverance. ( )

A very beautifully written, enlightening view of how parents cope with the abduction of their child and the other lives their decisions affect.

A very real story that sucks you in to the very end. Well done. ( )