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4.0étoiles sur 5
REVENGE IS SWEET AND DEADLY, Oct. 8 2009
Some youthful pranks are easily forgiven and forgotten. That was not the case with three friends from childhood, Roxanne, Del and Alice. It no longer becomes a prank when another person's life is unalterably changed, ruined. As adults the girls may well have forgotten the lie they once told but Father Romero cannot ever forget or forgive.
Relating her story between past and present Benedict introduces the trio who are always up for tricks and sometimes cruelty. When young, handsome Father Romero comes to their school, Our Lady of the Hills, he quickly becomes the object of their next escapade, an evil deception. Goaded by Roxanne they tell such a vicious lie about Romero that he is defrocked.
Fast forward to the trio as adults. It's amazing how little some personalities change with supposed maturity. Roxanne, now an artist, is still the leader, often overbearing and manipulative. Alice is married, not at all happily. She cannot have children, and her husband is involved with another woman. Del is happily married to Jock, and the mother of a daughter, Wendy. However, the once grounded Del seems to be losing touch with reality.
Varick, a mysterious stranger, has entered their lives and is destroying each of the women. Where did he come from, why and how is he doing this?
Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts is a noir tale, a blend of suspense and the supernatural given a splendid reading by Emily Durante who easily voices the women as teenagers and as adults. The narrator's voice inflections carry the listener from daylight to dark as the story progresses.
- Gail Cooke
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4.0étoiles sur 5
"There is no health in me, father", Déc 30 2008
Teenage machinations reach their devilish, cold and sticky fingers into the present in this terrifying melodrama where a shamed priest is forced to exact revenge after a lifetime of betrayal, and where three women must ultimately face the one lie upon which they have built their lives. Bitter, unsentimental, unforgiving, - and at times devastatingly violent - Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts is a portrait of Roxanne, Del and Alice whose deception is their only real talent. As young and vulnerable girls, all three are immediately in thrall to the handsome Cuban, Father Romero when he arrives to teach at their Catholic school, Our Lady of the Hills. But it is Roxanne who is most determined to act out her sexual fantasies with the attractive priest. When the girls suddenly conspire against him, Father Romero is cast out, forced to live on the fringes of society, consumed by the burdens of his sins. Even as he remains angst-riddled over his fall from grace, he finds comfort in the slave religion of Santeria and its dark rituals of revenge. Yet still Romero remains obsessed with Roxanne, the unleashing of all of the closeted passions late one night transforming his existence forever.
Meanwhile, the girls grow older, becoming successful members of Cincinnati society, but their apparent affluence and success hides a severe dysfunction, in part brought about by the secrets they've kept hidden along with all of the manipulative games they once played at Our Lady of the Hills. For years Alice has been obsessed with having a child with her dentist husband Thad, but Thad is unhappy and has fallen into an affair with his assistant Amber who also happens to be carrying his child. For her part, Roxanne is now an artist specializing in weird sculptures of birds, living on the fringes of the social page society. Work and art are the only things that mean anything to Roxanne. Lost in the past, Roxanne's dilemma is her rapidly fracturing relationship with Alice and her inability to pull Del back from the brink and the darkness she feels is closing in on her.
In the meantime, the poor and dependable Del is always trying just a little too hard as she aches to be the flawless suburban wife and the budding socialite, married to the loving Jock with their perfect little daughter Amber. The decent into madness for all of these characters begins with a sudden suicide. Alice begins to drift into a bizarre self-obsession even as she falls into despair over Thad's relationship with Amber. Thad is slipping away and Alice powerless to do anything about it and she convinced he doesn't love her anymore because of what she couldn't give him. When Amber's no-good brother appears back in town, the drugged-out and tattooed Dillon, it is clear that this group of people will be plagued by unfinished business. It is Dillon's befriending of the cruel Varik, an arrangement based on mutual need, that fuels much of the hatred and vitriol that follows as the narrative accelerates towards an ever-increasing mayhem.
Permeated with the soaring shadows of danger and menace, and also truly nasty characters, the novel is full of avenging angels and demons. Ultimately, Thad and Amber, Del, Alice and Roxanne all become the sad collateral damage of the psychopathic Varik who in turn seems to be the personification of evil and darkness itself. The novel is a devastatingly bleak portrayal of the nature of desire and of the murky world of revenge and the price we pay for believing in "sin" along with the sometimes futile attempts to recapture past pleasures. Ultimately Romero is bought back into the lives of Alice, Del and Roxanne, afflicted with the temptation born of flesh and mind, his soul in such a desperate state while physically he begins to be eaten away by the sins he had once committed as well as the ones now being committed by Varik. The characters all inevitably begin to spiral out of control, culminating in Alice's descent into complete madness, her toughness collapsing into vulnerability, leaving her with nothing to cling to as she begins to take her fury out on Thad and then on Amber. It's indeed a bleak and brutal vision as everyone seems to spiral through a world of naked fantasy, self-delusion and even murder. Meanwhile, Varik is intent to mold Romero's history entirely for his own use. Set in a wintry and bleak Cincinnati, the pages are constantly imbued with an eerily gothic atmosphere, similarly compelling and horrific, the book is absolutely impossible to put down until, in a flurry of anxiety, the final pages are exhaustively turned. Mike Leonard 2008.
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