- Paperback: 240 pages
- Publisher: Hyperion (Feb 18 2004)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0786886358
- ISBN-13: 978-0786886357
- Shipping Weight: 503 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
The lives of two bereaved men seeking respite on the southern highways parallel and converge in Miss Corpus, Clay McLeod Chapman's brutal and rewarding debut novel. Will Colby has returned to his Virginia home from a six-month tour in the merchant marines to find his new wife and lifelong love dead on the kitchen floor. Will had promised her a honeymoon drive to Florida, and after collecting her remains in travel coolers, he heads southward. In Florida, Phil Winters's teenage son has been found at the bottom of a swamp inside the van he lost control of during an asthma attack. Recovering his son's decomposed skull from the dredged vehicle, Phil departs on the road trip to New York he had planned with his son in the hope it would bring them closer.
On the way to their foreshadowed collision, both men travel through eerie landscapes populated by curiosities, such as the boy with an ear of corn attached to his deformed arm, or the son of a failing motel owner who manipulates car accidents for profit. Will and Phil's dreamlike first-person accounts are interrupted by the narratives of these marginal characters, as well as random radio broadcasts, providing a fragmented, dimensioned view of each man's story as well as the South as a whole. Full of random violence and backwoods oddities, Chapman's landscape often resembles the gothic terrain of Flannery O'Connor or the early works of Cormac McCarthy, and he offers precise, unflinching accounts of decay and cruelty, such as a burning motel "fed by the flesh of so many children that I believed the sun to be one big mass of burning bodies." Yet he balances such images with a continual sense of humanity, while his engaged prose describes a world of abiding mystery and rebirth. Though an often difficult read, Miss Corpus contains a strangely apt and ultimately weighty sense of optimism. --Ross Doll --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
This dizzyingly imaginative first novel by playwright and short story writer Chapman (Rest Area) is the entwined tale of two bereaved men who go on the road in search of redemption. At 19, William Colby returns to Virginia from four months at sea to discover his bride dead on the kitchen floor. In Florida, Philip Winters's teenage son is found decomposing at the bottom of a swamp. Colby had promised his wife a highway honeymoon, a drive south all the way to Florida. Winters's son had always wanted to travel north. Unaware of each other, the men embark on their personal pilgrimages, finally colliding with one another on I-95. Along the way, they come across a gallery of grotesque characters, from a little boy who has a corncob for an arm to a woman who gives bloody birth in a highway tollbooth. In a slow, simmering style that melds Southern folklore with a gothic sensibility, Chapman concocts a powerful tale that is suspenseful and moving. Much of the narrative is fragmented, related through shifting points of view. Using the road as his frame of reference, Chapman coins shocking similes: "my name lumbered out of my mouth like a dying dog-just hit by a speeding car along the highway." The book is heavy with horror-dismemberment, torture, arson and freakish car crashes abound-but Chapman's knack for storytelling and his vigorous prose establish a dramatic momentum, moving the tale to a violent, tragic crescendo. Suffused with a compassion, the novel transcends its bizarre premise and suggests that the magic of literature can make sense of life.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
Read, for this is my body. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Read, for this is my body. Read the first page
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Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Watch out for this book...,
By A Customer
This review is from: Miss Corpus (Hardcover)
So yes, we can all agree that this book is definitely not for everyone. But my God, when the right people find it... they'll be in for one heck of a good read. It's a motley crew of characters, but all have heart -- which is why what they do doesn't matter as much as why they do it in the first place. I'd say this is an author who's going far... and it all starts here.
3.0 out of 5 stars
Promising, but boring,
By "alexan412" (San Francisco) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Miss Corpus (Hardcover)
When I started this book, I was very intrigued with the personification of the Southern United States as a woman's body. I read it agressively hoping the whole book would be so poetic and captivating as the first five pages, but I was wrong. Several sections in the book dragged on too much for too long, even for a relatively short novel. My interest began to wane after half the book when I realized it was getting -quite bluntly- boring, but I held in there. Although it was written nicely with very complex character developement, there was no one central storyline or plot which sometimes makes you wonder "Where is he going with this?" The ending was abrupt and brought the book to an unsatisfying end.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Just Don't Work,
By A Customer
This review is from: Miss Corpus (Hardcover)
I am struck by how many of the positive reviews for this book were written by people from the author's hometown. I wish I'd noticed this before forking over my dough because this bird don't fly. It's a real turkey. Less a book and more a spec script for an unproduced X-Files episode. Take a pass.
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