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The Cry Room and Other Places

by John Boaz

325 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #04-1464; ISBN 1-4120-3636-4; US$32.00, C$36.00, EUR26.50, £18.50

Unsanitized nostalgia depicting rural brutality and criminality, small town corruption, violence and substance abuse with crystal clear images of danger and death on the railroad.

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about the book      about the author      excerpts      catalogue info

About the Book It required fourteen years to complete the following forty-some sketches outlining my family background and personal history from birth until I left home at eighteen in order to try my hand as a university student. Excepting Ralph Ellison's final work, that may be record slowness in pages per day, I'm not sure. Only recently have I experienced a sense of urgency, for surely tomb-time cannot be far away. I enjoyed writing them, fancying each one a regional canvas a la Benton, Curry, Sample, Hogue, Marsh, et al., paintings depicting now dead worlds of steam locomotives and noisy roundhouses, small town killings and tank town tarts, railroad boomers and Main Street toughs, three dollar whore houses and cigarette-fogged pool rooms, death traps masquerading as idyllic farms and school systems that imposed death at an early age on children from "across the tracks." It's all been written, it's all been painted before; but I had to recreate it once again because it was mine, and I loved it.

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About the Author The author is a retired psychiatrist, born in 1937 and raised on an Illinois farm by a farmer -a railroad engineer uncle old enough to be his grandfather. Thus he imbibed during childhood and adolescence two traditional modes of American life, the land and the rail, in a setting more reminiscent of the 19th than the 20th Century. This anachronistic ambience placed him somewhat out of step with his peers, but it also allowed the development of a unique manner of perception which could interpret the daily harshness and even the horrors of farm and railroad accidents, with a grim sense of humour rarely to be found outside the writings of Ellison, Vonnegut and Heller.

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Excerpts

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Catalogue Information

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