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Title: Land O'Goshen

Author: Charles McNair

Narrator: Brian Hatch

Format: Unabridged

Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-03-16

Publisher: ListenUp Audiobooks

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 2 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

Part romance, part adventure yarn, part horror story, a novel about a boy and his friend growing up in a mythical Southern town draws on the most fantastic elements in the tradition of the Southern novel.

Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1994.

Members Reviews:

This book won't let me go, almost 20 years later

Charles McNair's Land O'Goshen is a book that has stayed with me since its 1994 publication. McNair puts us into a post-apocalyptic nightmare of society run amok, being pulled in chains to the RIGHT way of thinking, even the ONLY way of thinking and living. Fundamentalist Christian soldiers are ever on the lookout for those who aren't right enough, who flaunt the rules of this new world. The writing is lush, and I found myself deeply attracted by certain twists of a story so coiled in on itself that escape is impossible. Today, as a liberal working hard to stay centrist, the gritty truth in Land O'Goshen makes me want to jump to the left, to persuade others to do so...yikes, I want to scream that what McNair proposes in fiction is beginning to come true. I pride myself on sensibility and on living as free of fear as possible, but Land O'Goshen makes me want to tear up all possible means of identity and find a cave on an island where I can't be assassinated for my liberal beliefs. So I admit to one fear, that the book is nonfiction. Or, at the least, an eerily accurate prophesy of what is to come. If so, I would say to my friends, we must get the hell out of Dodge while we still can.

Funny, I didn't mention funny. McNair is such a skillful writer that he can speak of the unspeakable in a way that will have the reader laughing without understanding why. A sort of gallows humor but more so. Imagine a prisoner with a rope around his neck while strapped to an elevated electric chair with a loaded syringe inserted in his forearm. Before kicking the chair out from under the man, flipping the switch for the lethal current, and pushing the plunger on the hypodermic, the executioner says, "Maybe we should have added a guillotine and a firing squad just to be sure." In such a sick depiction, our only outlet is to laugh...my funny bone was struck over and over by this delicious book.

Now I have Pickett's Charge to look forward to (Livingston Press, September 2013), and another McNair novel eventually, The Epicurean.

Fine dystopic novel with a comic twist

McNair has a Southernerâs penchant for imbedded metaphor and colorful language. Of a barroom fight, he writes, âHis hands gripped that pool cue so hard . . . I thought sawdust might come out between his fingers.â And he has a Southernerâs penchant for the grotesque since surely one main character in this wondrous novel is âThe Wild Thang,â an outlandish, smelly full-body disguise that the young fourteen-year-old hero, Buddy, snitches from a circus. In the circus tent, the Wild Thang struck fear into the onlookers. With Buddyâs additional dead animal skins and feathers garnered from the wild woods, the disguise becomes nearly supernatural, instilling complete surrender and pandemonium.