Welcome to The Friday 56 hosted by Freda’s Voice.
This is a really fun meme!
The only rules are to grab a book (any book), turn to page 56 or 56% in your eReader and find a sentence or a few (no spoilers) that grabs you and post it.
Then go over to Freda’s Voice and leave your link so we can visit your 56!
My 56 for this week is from
The Captive Condition
by Kevin P. Keating
My 56
…he applied for a library card at the college and ordered stacks of books. Sometimes he requested mystery novels and studied their plots, which like the streets of town were straight, perpendicular, Euclidean in their logic and predictability, cobbled together with fabricated blocks of prose, a black-and-white world that was precisely structured, carefully framed, and inhabited by characters as flat as the surrounding country-side. In those stories death was a farce, an amusing way to pass the time, but the Gonk, who was building something grandiose and dangerous in his mind, read these novels the same way he might read books on carpentry and electrical wiring – with a craftsman’s keen eye for detail and with the implicit understanding that he was bound to run into unexpected problems somewhere down the road.
I know this a bit long, but it’s only two sentences, and it says so much.
Read on if you want to know more.
Synopsis
A seemingly idyllic Midwestern college town turns out to be a nexus of horror in this spellbinding novel—emotionally and psychologically complex, at once chilling and deliciously dark—from a thrilling new voice in fiction.
When Emily Ryan is found drowned in the family pool, pumped full of barbiturates and alcohol, a series of events with cataclysmic consequences ensues. Emily’s lover, a college professor, finds himself responsible for her twin daughters, whose piercing stares fill him with the guilt and anguish he so desperately tries to hide from his wife. A low-level criminal named The Gonk takes over the cottage of a reclusive elderly artist, complete with graveyard and moonshine still, and devises plans for both. His young apprentice, haunted by inner demons, seeks retribution for the professor’s wicked deeds. The town itself, buzzing into decadent life after sundown, traps its inhabitants in patterns of inexplicable behavior all the while drawing them toward a night in which the horror will reach its disturbing and inevitable conclusion.
Delving into the deepest recesses of the human capacity for evil, Kevin P. Keating’s masterful novel will captivate readers from first to last.
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