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Review: The Value of Rain by Brandon Shire

"There are dead people in my head." From the opening line to last, The Value of Rain by Brandon Shire seizes your heart and does not let go, even long after the book is closed. The story of a family that fuses love to hatred and  life to  death and rolls those two fusions together, so that it is impossible to ever separate them. Though only a few scenes take place in New Orleans, The Value of Rain echoes the southern gothic tradition, entangled and hidden bloodlines and all. Indeed Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty would be comfortable in this world, and would be envious of the writer. The characters are strong in their weaknesses, and their strengths always betray them. A first act of physical love propels a young boy from his already precarious existence into the living hell of a psychiatric hospital for a hideous 'cure' for his gayness. Charles's  non-chronological narrative of his journey through that hell, and all that follows,  is told with an unerring eye for detail, both physical and emotional.  The Value of Rain also shows the strong emotionally warping effect of revenge; given the chance to escape, to just be loved for himself, Charles finds he can not let go of the emotional and deadly pas de deux with his mother Charlotte. This is a lyrically beautiful  book, masterfully  woven with intense emotion, insightful and frightening in its clarity.

Starting the home stretch.

 

Call me Ishmael or Wayne or  Ben. It is my real name(not the Ishmael part) or at least part of it anyway. Only a few select people called me Ben and 2 of them are dead.(They're not dead because they called me Ben, but because life is what it is, and no words, magic or not, and  not even love can stop death) No this is not one of those blogs. I already have one of those tracking the downturn of my life since my partner died 3 1/2  years ago. I thought it would help me survive but it didn't. I died anyway for a while. This is me coming back to life again-more or less. This will be a little history and a little current life and probably more than a little fiction, since I no longer recognize truth or reality. And that is good, because my love for writing fiction has come back from its own death at the hands of fact-based textbooks and writing technical manuals and low of lows, catalogs for museums and art galleries (that I could hide horrible puns in those without anyone every seeing them made those nearly redemptive though). I feel reborn. I started to revise something I had written years ago, and realized that I could not. I don't even remember the person who wrote that or why he would even contemplate such a horrible thing. After the initial disappointment, I suddenly found myself with six new works in progress, all eager to fall out of my head. I don't know the person writing these either, but I am hanging on for the ride. Not enough time left to get off and get back on again.

Note this blog has been in existence for several years, all of the previous posts, mostly rants about my old life and  worldview have been hidden. I couldn't erase them any more than I could erase my past, though Time with its usual lack of emotion,will take care of that erasure for mem so I can slink off without more than the usual regrets