'The King of Lies' crossbreeds enough Grisham-style intrigue and Turow-style brooding to make for a sulfurous mix. 'Sights no man should see swelled and burst like rotten fruit,' Work observes, as the shrill ending to an otherwise effective melodrama draws near. There aren't many of them, but they manage to provide kidnapping, rape, patricide, a suicide attempt and a fatal car crash. 'I hope he's rotting in hell.' This sets the tone for a book with passionate, cryptic, embittered and poisonous characters. 'The king is dead,' Jean says about their father. Work has a sister, Jean, a damaged soul of whom he is peculiarly overprotective. 'I wanted the details,' Work tells the reader, 'and she gave them to me in short, bitten sentences that the warm spring breeze could not soften.' When Ezra's corpse is discovered, his son, known as Work, receives the news from both a female detective and the ghost of James M. He is the bullying father of Jackson Workman Pickens, the lawyer who is the novel's narrator. The victim, also kingpin of the title, is Ezra Pickens, an evil patriarch straight out of the noir playbook. All that separates the two narrators is a trap door, serving as the thin symbolic barrier between adult life and childhood.Īdult-child tensions also shape 'The King of Lies,' John Hart's seething, roiling, boiling North Carolina murder story. Meanwhile the other story transpires right upstairs. For instance forest creatures have created a hideout beneath the local library, where (here comes more of the book-club part) reading matter includes works by Flannery O'Connor and Wallace Stevens. When worlds collide here, much of the tension and suspense is highly visual. 'In place of the usual distance and separation from the audience came a sense of connection through performance.' 'From the very first notes, I was determined to tell the story of how the child is stolen and replaced by someone else, and yet both the child and the changeling persist,' the composer reveals, and he might as well be speaking for Mr. The symphony's movements are 'awareness, pursuit, lamentation and redemption.' One of the two boys in later years will make the following notes to himself: 'Not fairy but hobgoblin.' 'Ruined my life.' 'Find Henry Day.' And one will be associated with a symphony that is called 'The Stolen Child,' a composition that expresses (here comes the book-club part) the themes of the overall parable. Before that century he was somebody else entirely. And the new Henry Day, who turns out to be a musical prodigy, spent a century waiting to become human. But Aniday is still dimly part of the Day family, at least in his increasingly distant memories. About the changeling's shape-shifting process: 'There's considerable pushing and pulling at the cartilage, as if the skull were a soft wad of clay or taffy, and then the malicious business with the teeth, the removal of the hair and the tedious reweaving.' Then it's time to explore ramifications of the switch, like the psychological ordeal of the kidnap victim.įollow closely (and it isn't always easy): the former Henry Day became part of a band of woodland creatures, 'boys and girls stuck in time, ageless, feral as a pack of wild dogs.' So he isn't Henry Day anymore. The idea of this changeling, while potentially spooky, is domesticated by the reassuring mundanity of Mr.

Shifty looking dark moon