Thomas Rayfiel

Ethan Harms is not a nice person. He’s in a maximum security prison with good reason (though the reader will question and wait to learn why); he’ll never be released. But prison walls can be built from family history, mental illness and personal folly, just as surely as from bricks and mortar, all of which might crumble and prove porous to rot and decay. The walls of this aging prison building are surely decaying, and the guards might complain.

Ethan introduces himself, his fellow prisoners, and their supposedly free guards in Thomas Rayfiel’s novel, Harms’ Way, revealing curious quirks and deluded dreams along the way. There’s the killer whose memoir has made him beloved of lonely women in the free world, the native American whom none dare cross, the PhD student who longs to know too much, the careless guard and more. There are curious motivations—to be seen, not to be seen, to be famous… And there are questions of sanity. All told with quiet depth and humor, it adds up maybe, almost, until the reader begins to wonder if the narrator can truly be trusted—and why would we have trusted a murderer’s voice anyway?

Curiously enticing, this novel strikes a well-tuned balance between horrific crime and human realism, spiced with humor and touches of mystery. By the end it’s not just the narrator whom we might distrust, but the neighbor, the stranger, and the world around us. Perhaps also the stranger within… The novel is curiously enticing indeed, and disturbing too, and a hauntingly good read.

Disclosure: I was given a preview edition by the publisher and I offer my honest review.… (más)

Lord Upton, in the twilight of his years, and his ancestral country home play host to his grandson Seabold, one of his friends, and the daughters of one of his tenants. Upton is recording the goings-on in his journal, as terrible memories from the past haunt him. As his senses begin to fail him, we wonder how much is reliable from our narrator. But it is clear that all is not what it seems, especially the relationships between the characters.

While the story is quite gothic, it lacks the compelling storytelling of say a Bronte. I found that the shocking revelations in the tale didn't send chills up my spine so much as cause me to roll my eyes. There's an interesting thing going on with making the narrator a man succumbing to disease and dementia and writing down his observations in diary form, but it doesn't explore this well enough. Too much is lost on the silly Seasbold plot that just when the story starts to get good, (Is Col visiting the Hall out of spite? Or is it another manifestation of Lord Upton's disease?), it ends.

The author handled Victorian language well until it came to describing the scandalous parts, where then it seemed out of place. ("The first time he showed me his penis...") I get a feeling that the author truly appreciates the era, but isn't fluent enough in it to express that time throughout the story.

At little over 150 pages, I felt I could have tackled this story in a day. However, despite my love for Victoria-era tales, I had to push myself through this one. There was little likeable in any of the characters to keep me interested for too long. Lord Upton should be more sympathetic, but being introduced to the secrets of his strange, incestuous family early in the novel put me at a distance from him. And, really, once you introduce incest early in the novel, all the other revelations fizzle out by comparison. A better gothic tale would draw out the suspense.… (más)

Once again, I have done a frightful job of choosing an Early Reviewers book for myself.

As in previous cases, I wanted to like this book. Based on the summary that the publisher provided, I should have liked it. After all, an old man’s dying reminisces during the Victorian era, weaving his past together with his grandson’s future, should make for fascinating reading.

But it didn’t. And I think it was somewhat disingenuous of The Permanent Press to focus their summary on the approach of death. That, of course, is a thread throughout, but it quickly becomes subordinated to a tangle of dirty, vagrant, incestuous relationships that reach out of the past, into the present and the future.

Indeed, it would have been far more honest marketing (paradox, anyone?), if less effective, to do away with all the twaddle about the book conjuring up “the lost world of the English countryside” and the narrator becoming the reader’s “friend,” and simply to say:

This book is about DEATH. And SEX. And VICTORIAN REPRESSION. GRR.

Maybe I'm a prude, but I really do not wish to read about incest, pedophilia, and the like. Moreover, I don't think anyone needs to be reading about such things, unless it’s for the sake of prevention. The content was not graphic, thank goodness, the most explicit thing I can remember being a passing reference to a certain male body part. But the fact was that little of it had a point. It didn’t advance the plot. It did not give us any great insight into the world of the characters, except that they were all messed up and that the Victorian era was an age of Evil Repression (ironic, considering that everyone in the book seems to be acting on their desires rather than repressing them). Haven’t we all heard that about a hundred times, to the point that it's now a cliché?

I do not think Rayfiel is a bad writer. Quite the opposite, in fact. There are some lovely passages, such as this one: “Nature is a balm not appreciated by the young.” Also, I like the fact that he can see a certain tragedy in the idea of death being merely a descent into nothingness. But sometimes the scenes are difficult to follow because he ignores dialogue tags. And in the end it’s just a shame that he squandered his talents on such worthless material.

Despite my high expectations going into this book, I could not finish it. For the first third or so I read it intently. Then I started skimming. And then I finally gave up altogether. Not recommended.

Addendum:

When I describe the book and its setting as "Victorian," I may be using the term rather loosely. In reality, Rayfiel never provides dates. Never mind; in the marvelously funny note that accompanied my galley copy, the publishers revealed themselves to be just as confused as me, if not more so:

—“Written in a British Regency style, Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters will spring to mind.”
—“Time Among the Dead joins ranks with other recent Neo Victorian publications—such as Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters—without having to resort to anything paranormal.”

Please ignore the fact that Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters is neo-Regency rather than neo-Victorian, that the Brontës were from the Victorian rather than the Regency era, and that, grammatically speaking, the first sentence does not make sense at all. The note, unlike the book, is definitely a keeper.… (más)