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Fiction |
 Soaked in night visions and pierced through by jagged memory, Talking God’s Radio Show tells that peculiarly American story in which, as Faulkner once said, “The past isn’t forgotten, it isn’t even the past.” John High’s Virginia backwaters call to mind the feral, hallucinogenic American landscapes of Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, as well as Faulkner’s Sanctuary. His journey through their underworld of racial and sexual transgression sparks caustic, brain-searing consequences—we discover, at the soul’s black bottom, a resolute will to rise up and die, as if both actions were one in the same. This novel is an lyric ode to the heart’s ineluctable damnation and redemption. Albert Mobilio There’s no credibility gap between the lives of John High’s characters and his empathy for them and his descriptions of their exterior and interior worlds is charged with beauty and always on target. The red-light district of Richmond, Virginia in the mid-sixties is the backdrop and High is the ultimate time-traveler—recreating the arcane of a world that seems long gone but is actually steeped in present day time. Talking God’s Radio Show is airtight and explosive and belongs on the same shelf as James Ellroy’s My Dark Places and Leslie Silko’s Ceremony. Devastating and heartbreaking and revelatory by turn, a virtuoso performance forever in the eye of the storm. Lewis Warsh
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