The novel is written in the style of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, if McCarthy were to write a Coen Brothers screenplay, with maximal scenic description and elaborate stage direction guiding the actor’s motivation and thoughts.

“Vast signs stretch over streets to form crude tunnels in whose shaded interiors trespass mortal wanderers. One sign stands beside and not over the expanse of street, a mammoth billboard seemingly related to none of its squalid surroundings and decorated by its single cryptic word. JESUS. Vultures line telephone poles, one after another looking down on the world and somewhere nearby something is dead.”

The close third person narration knows more than the character who studies a woman he is about to seduce,

“Two hours of white knuckles among the dizzying fray of impromptu midday traffic leads to this place and this moment, untold variables aligning to allow now to transpire. He watches the secretary in the glow of her monitor. She reads things she’s read once, twice already, lips moving with the words so that for fractions of a thought there appears a glimpse into that mouth, that dark place where those whispered words are born. He sees in her the ephemeral trace of all loves that a ghost of memory touches, the pang of the past that means something underneath the skin. He sees hot summers and movie theaters and grass more green than grass could possibly be and he loses himself for just a second and no more in the velvet fall of that memory’s hold.”

If religion were the only thing that gave life purpose, it’d be easy to drop into nihilism, but in Rodgers’ prose there is a Wallace Stevens-like intoning that turns his art into a philosophy, upon hearing a

…banshee howl that scrapes away the lucid layers of the mind. The infant imagination underneath understands this subhuman sound not at all but accepts it with the immediacy of the truly unbiased.

Those quotes speak for themselves. Congratulations to Craig Rodgers, thanks to Charles Holdefer, and my apologies to Dactyl Review readers for the four-month delay in deciding this award. There were many excellent books to consider and I am a very slow reader.

VN Alexander