The Good and the Ghastly: A NovelJames Boice
Scribner, June 2011
ISBN: 978-1416575443
A wild satire of our own society, The Good and the Ghastly is a visceral novel informed by Boice's unnerving sense of reality and pathology. It is also an honest, old-fashioned good-versus-evil story—with a twist of modern-day madness.
The Good and the Ghastly takes place 1500 years from now, after nuclear Armageddon has wiped out most of civilization. There are very few survivors in this world where the oceans have risen high enough to flood much of the world’s low lying areas. Civilization has been rebuilt based on scanty and flagrantly wrong fragments of lore. All products are named by a status-linked phrase such as Visa Expensive Hotel. Visa is the generic term for government or other organizations or corporations.
Junior Alvarez, is a brutal psychopath who likens himself to Alexander the Great and Bob Dylan. As a teenager Junior beats another teenager so savagely in a mass gang fight that his opponent never regains consciousness, forcing his loving mother to devote all of her time to his care. The mother, Josephina Hernandez, becomes an avenging angel determined to wipe out the criminal monsters who have made her world a living hell. Junior is her ultimate target.
In this semi-dystopian landscape James Boice paints two figures whose primitive ambitions color their world like bloodstains. Junior and Josephina are skillfully rendered in poetic and compelling language, so beautiful that the reader is swept along in spite of the bestial and psychotic nature of the one and the awful pain of the other. The novel achieves great heights in the poetic rendering of the inner lives of these two profoundly disturbed characters.
Boice's prose carries the kind of energy that readers always want in good crime fiction. It's fast without being hasty, smart without being pretentious and brutal without being overwrought. His scenes and characters have power in themselves, but it's the prose that gives them weight, from Junior's post-empire paranoia to Josefina's desperate, violent hunt for the man who wrecked her family. The Good and the Ghastly is the kind of book that that demonstrates the best of literary fiction, a book that continues to elicit even more after the last page is read.
JAMES BOICE was born in California in 1982, raised in northern Virginia, and currently lives near Boston. He was featured in the McSweeney's New Writers Issue in 2003. His work has also appeared in Fiction, Like Water Burning, and The Shore, among other publications. MVP is his first novel. An excerpt appeared in Esquire, which deemed him the "New Voice" and his work "A Story Unlike Anything You've Read Before."
JAMES BOICE was born in California in 1982, raised in northern Virginia, and currently lives near Boston. He was featured in the McSweeney's New Writers Issue in 2003. His work has also appeared in Fiction, Like Water Burning, and The Shore, among other publications. MVP is his first novel. An excerpt appeared in Esquire, which deemed him the "New Voice" and his work "A Story Unlike Anything You've Read Before."
ISBN: 978-1416575443; ISBN10: 1416575448; Imprint: Scribner; On Sale: 6/14/2011; Format: Hardcover; Pages: 288; $25.00
