Vernon Downs
Jaime Clarke
Roundabout Press
April, 2014
Pre-order available through Roundabout Press now
Idgie Says:
How many authors out there have ever had to deal with a fan of their writing that feels they know them a little too well? You don't hear about author stalkers much, but they're out there.
In this book Charlie is one of them. You try to feel badly for him, with all of the harsh incidents in his life, but in this book, neither he, nor the author he stalks, are very likable. So while the book and the story line is interesting, the characters are hard to feel for when anything goes wrong for them.
It's an intriguing story line that is just realistic enough to have my author friends put up a few more emotional walls when the fans get "tooclose".
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Book Description:
Charlie Martens is desperate for stability in an otherwise peripatetic life. An explosion that killed his parents when he was young robbed him of normalcy and he was shuttled from relative to relative, left alone to decipher the world he encountered in order to cobble together an answer as to how he would live. Ever the outcast, Charlie recognizes in Olivia, an international student from London, the sense of otherness he feels and their relationship seems to promise salvation. But when Olivia abandons him, his desperate mind fixates on her favorite writer, Vernon Downs, who becomes an emblem for reunion with Olivia.
Charlie’s quest takes him from Phoenix to New York City and when chance brings him into proximity to Vernon Downs, he quickly ingratiates himself into Downs’s world. Proximity invites certain temptations, though, and it isn’t long before Charlie moves dangerously from fandom to apprentice to outright possession.
Jaime Clarke is the author of the novel We’re So Famous, editor of Don’t You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes, Conversations with Jonathan Lethem, and Talk Show, as well as co-editor of No Near Exit: Writers Select Their Favorite Work from Post Road Magazine and Boston Noir 2: The Classics. He is a founding editor of the literary magazine Post Road, now published at Boston College, and co-owner of Newtonville Books, an independent bookstore in Boston.I do have to note here, that while Jaime is against you buying his book at Amazon, you will be finding his book for sale there. I received the why's and how's from the publicist - "As for Amazon, Jaime isn't selling his book there. Amazon gets their listings from publishers and distributors, so when we submitted the title to Small Press Distribution, which is our distributor, which lets independent bookstores order our titles, Amazon picked the information up from them and listed the book on their site."
Follow the link to read why Jaime is encouraging indie store purchase only: Click Here to Read.