Another kind of Eden

Review by Booklist Review

In The Jealous Kind (2016), set in early-1950s Galveston, Aaron Holland Broussard was a teenager in the grips of passion. In this latest chapter in Burke's multigenerational Holland saga, it's 10 years later, 1962, on the cusp of the hippie era, and Aaron, now a nightmare-haunted Korean War vet, is working on a ranch near Denver and trying to write. Like all of Burke's heroes, Aaron can't keep his mouth shut or his fists at his sides. First, he defends a woman who's being harassed by her professor, which leads to encounters with some early-wave flower children, one of whom is less peacenik and more predator. Meanwhile, Aaron gets on the wrong side of a bent businessman and his son, both of whom seem driven by something way beyond garden-variety meanness. The supernatural, especially in the form of demons, has become a near-constant presence in Burke's fiction, and here those demons are ready to rumble. Like Dave Robicheaux, Burke's other series hero, Aaron has "always believed in the unseen world," so he's not completely surprised by the vibes he's getting from his adversaries, but he has no conception of the otherworldly carnage that awaits him in the book's finale. Incorporating elements of horror into otherwise realistic thrillers is a thing these days, but few manage it with Burke's special eloquence, at once melancholic and macabre.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

It's 1962 in bestseller MWA Grand Master Burke's captivating sequel to 2016's The Jealous Kind, and Aaron Holland Broussard, a drifting aspiring novelist, hops off a boxcar near Denver and finds work on a large farm. After the son of a local tyrannical businessman assaults Aaron and some coworkers, Jo Anne McDuffy, a beautiful art student, warns Aaron not to seek revenge. But as much as Aaron, who begins a relationship with Jo Anne, tries to suppress his violent instincts, trouble won't let him be, with local goons and law enforcement harassing him. Meanwhile, a nefarious professor circles Jo Anne with dubious intentions. Suffering nonchemical blackouts and warding off memories of his time in the Korean War, Aaron slowly unravels as the majestic beauty of the west turns into a hellscape of murdered women, cults, and mysterious forces that might not be of this world. Sharp prose and distinctive characters help propel Aaron's journey from earnest farmhand to tormented soul in a world of horrors. Suspense fans will be well satisfied. Agents: Philip Spitzer and Lukas Ortiz, Philip G. Spitzer Literary. (Aug.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Aaron Holland Broussard is a Korean War veteran, writer, and vagabond with memory lapses and dissociative personality disorder. In the early 1960s, he jumps off a train in Colorado and lands a job at a farm (following his appearance in Burke's 1952-set The Jealous Kind). Aaron's troubles begin when he and his fellow farmhands are attacked near Ludlow, CO. Joanne McDuffy witnesses the attack and warns Aaron that the perpetrators, Rueben Vickers and his son Darrel, are pure evil. Perceptive, quick-witted Aaron finds an equal match in Joanne. He'd like to settle into a relationship with her, but he's continually thwarted--by the Vickerses' violence; a detective bent on revenge; a bus full of beatniks; unsolved murders; and the demons, metaphorical and otherwise, that plague Aaron. VERDICT Dark backstories linger behind each complex character in this action-packed novel. Readers who first meet Aaron here will want to read previous novels in Burke's "Holland Family" saga.--Emily Hamstra, Seattle

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Ten years after dropping him in Houston, Burke picks up the story of Aaron Holland Broussard in 1962 Colorado. The story is as eventful as ever. When Aaron, Spud Caudill, and Cotton Williams, all of whom work at Jude Lowry's dairy and produce farm, make a delivery in Lowry's truck, a pair of tough guys, incensed at the United Farm Workers bumper sticker Aaron never noticed, beat them up. As if to rub salt into the wound, the ringleader's father, Rueben Vickers, brings his son out to Lowry's to demand an explanation for how his boy Darrel got bruised. Aaron, a man who's "incapable of deliberately doing wrong" even when he's "surrounded by evil," doesn't lose his cool, but the serious moral judgments he levels against the old man provoke Rueben to whip him on the spot. His head-over-heels attraction to cafe waitress/painter Jo Anne McDuffy doesn't offer much relief: She's slow to reciprocate his interest, and her involvement with Henri Devos, the smarmy, self-satisfied art professor who's borrowed $500 from her, is murky and gets even murkier once Aaron meets hophead Marvin Fogel and the other pre-Haight groupies Devos is hosting in a school bus. As usual, Burke orchestrates a series of escalating encounters between Aaron and the Vickers father and son that promise a violent release, but this time the violence is mostly withheld (except for the obligatory backstories and some nameless prostitutes recently killed) until the ending, which has all the intensity of a fever dream and not much more explanatory power. The haunted hero is last spotted near Flagstaff, from which fans will surely look forward to hearing more. And more. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Prologue Prologue THE EVENTS I'M about to describe may challenge credulity. I do not blame the reader. Young Goodman Brown wanders these pages. The macabre images, the Gothic characters, the perfume from a poisonous garden could have been created with the ink from Nathaniel Hawthorne's pen. But the operative word is "could." Edwin Arlington Robinson once wrote that God slays Himself with every leaf that flies. I think the same is true of us. I think we cannot understand ourselves until we understand that living is a form of dying. My generation was born during the Great Depression and, for good or bad, will probably be the last generation to remember traditional America. Our deaths may be inconsequential; the fling we had was not. Cursed or blessed with the two faces of Janus, we saw the past and the future simultaneously but were sojourners in both, and most of us had gone into the night even before we knew the sun had set. In our ephemerality, we were both vain and innocent, as children can be vain and innocent. In our confidence that the evil of German fascism and Japanese imperialism lay smoldering in the ashes of Berlin and Hiroshima, we believed the republic of Jefferson and Adams had become the model for the rest of humankind, without acknowledging the internecine nature of triumphalism. Music was everywhere. Dixieland, Brubeck, R&B, swing, C&W, rock and roll, Bird. The amusement piers along the Gulf Coast rang with it. In the hurricane season, when the nights were as black as silk, the waves seemed to swallow the stars and turn the waves to burgundy. They were five feet high, hissing with foam, swollen with seaweed and shellfish, with the thudding density of lead, smelling of birth and organic turmoil and destruction; then, suddenly, they would lift you into the air, pinioning your arms behind you like Jesus on his cross, and release you on the sand as a mother would a child. It was a grand time to be around. War was an aberration. Bergen-Belsen and Changi Prison were devised by foreign lunatics who wore the uniforms of clowns. A GI with a cigarette lighter that had a sketch on the side of Mount Fuji was a celebrity. But the fondest memories were the drive-in theaters, the formal dances under a silver ball, the summer tuxes and hooped crinoline dresses, the dollar-fifty corsages and small boxes of chocolate-covered cherries we gave to our dates at their front door, the flush in a girl's face when you kissed her cheek, the shared conviction that spring was forever and none of us would ever die. But illusion is illusion, and the millions of bison and passenger pigeons slaughtered on the plains and the whalebones that still wash ashore on the New England coast are testimony to our anthropogenic relationship with the earth. And for that reason I have written this account of the events to which I was witness in the year 1962, in the days just before the Cuban Missile Crisis. These events fill me with sorrow and give me no peace. They also make me question my sanity. But they occurred, and others can reckon with them or not. I said Goodman Brown found his way into this story. That's not quite accurate. I believe the human story is collective, that we write it together, but only a few are willing to recognize their participation in it. T. E. Lawrence described the aftermath of the Turks at work in an Arabian village. I have never forgotten the images, and I have never forgiven him for implanting them in my memory. At the conclusion of this story, I hope I have not done that to you. Excerpted from Another Kind of Eden by James Lee Burke All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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