The Dark Farewell, by Josh Lanyon

Title: The Dark Farewell
Author: Josh Lanyon
Publisher: Samhain Publishing
Length: Novella/93 pages
Buy the book: Publisher

Blurb:

Don’t talk to strangers, young man—especially the dead ones.

It’s the Roaring Twenties. Skirts are short, crime is rampant and booze is in short supply. Prohibition has hit Little Egypt, where newspaperman David Flynn has come to do a follow-up story on the Herren Massacre. The massacre isn’t the only news in town though. Spiritualist medium Julian Devereux claims to speak to the dead—and he charges a pretty penny for it.

Flynn knows a phoney when he sees one, and he’s convinced Devereux is as fake as a cigar store Indian. But the reluctant attraction he feels for the deceptively soft, not-his-type Julian is as real as it gets.

Suddenly Julian begins to have authentic, bloodstained visions of a serial killer, and the cynical Mr. Flynn finds himself willing to defend Julian with not only his life, but his body.

Review:

I really, really wanted to like this story more than I did.

David Flynn is a newspaperman who travels to a small rural Southern town that played host to a massacre of strikebreakers a few months earlier. In 1922, this is big news. But bigger news to Flynn is that in the boarding house he’s staying at is a dark and enigmatic young man named Julian, who has come to town with his saturnine grandfather as a traveling psychic. Add in a serial killer preying on–say it with me–helpless young women–and a boarding house full of Faulkneresque side players: the country doctor, the traveling salesman, the bloated, overbearing mother and her shrinking violet daughter, and stir.

Then bake at 350 degrees for thirty minutes and watch this story fall in the middle.

I confess to being mightily impressed by quite a few aspects of Lanyon’s writing: the lush and lyrical detail of Lanyon’s setting, the crisp bite of his sentences, the outstanding narrative control he displays, for instance. And the characterization of everyone who’s not Flynn is superb.

Let me explain.

Lanyon’s writing is technically excellent, and some of my favorite passages in the novella consist of all the supporting characters sitting in a parlor or on a front porch, shooting the breeze. Y’all, making those kinds of scenes really shine? That takes raw skill. That stuff’s hard to do.

At the same time, boy howdy does Lanyon like to take every opportunity to tell the audience how his protagonist feels about the action. Take this exchange, for instance:

The miners were striking for safe working conditions and decent wages. They deserve that. Anybody deserves that. But Lester and the other mine owners shipped in them strikebreakers and scabs and gave away the striking miners’ jobs. I stand by what I say. They deserve what they got.”

There were mutters of agreement from the other men at Skeltcher’s Tavern. Except that Skeltcher’s wasn’t a tavern anymore. Theoretically it was a soft drink parlor. Every town, every wide-spot-in-the-road now had a small, weather-beaten saloon currently known as a soft drink parlor though the clientele hanging around those joints didn’t much look like sody pop drinkers to Flynn.

“What about these stories about cutting the throats of the wounded men?”

“Don’t believe everything you read in the papers, pal.”

“I won’t,” Flynn said gravely.

An older man with the cough that came from too many years of cigarettes—or coal dust—chimed in, “If rich, blood-sucking mine owners like Lester get away with using thugs and scabs to break a strike down here in a union stronghold, then the UMWA and the other unions are finished in this country.”

McCarty agreed. “Those miners were acquitted by a jury—two juries—of their peers. That’s justice.”

Flynn nodded politely and stood McCarty to another “root beer”. Maybe it wasn’t justice, but it
seemed to be raw democracy in action.

There are a couple of problems here. First, This conversation would’ve been a lot easier to read if I didn’t have to stop and listen to how Flynn feels about everything every three seconds. Two, that’s about the extent of the whole conversation. The action never really gets going long enough to be enjoyed before Flynn’s off to the next lonely patch of sidewalk to tell us how he feels about everything. And that’s a motif that continues throughout the book. The action scenes are short and choppy, and to some extent the reader winds up trapped inside Flynn’s head.

But then there’s also this:

“You’re just in time,” the freckle-faced girl in the ticket booth told him. “We got strict orders to lock the door after the show starts.”

“Is it much of a crowd?”

To his surprise, the girl said, “Oh, yes. The Magnificent Belloc impressed a lot of folks last night, and they told their friends and families.”

Flynn raised skeptical brows, but he went inside the lobby which was startlingly ornate with dark wood and gilt fixtures and red carpets. An usher held the door for him and Flynn slipped inside the darkened theater.

Behold! A freckle-faced girl taking tickets and an usher whose sole purpose is to ush. As someone who is all about the details, I am all warm and tingly at that passage. It’s holistic world-building, and even though that term is most often used in connection with sci-fi and fantasy, for me it’s just as important in most stories I read, especially when the protagonist–say it with me–is wholly unlikeable.

Oh Flynn.

Flynn, I really wanted to like you. I really, really wanted to like you, what with you being a WWII veteran who lost his Own True Love in combat, and you’re cynical and believe the worst of people to boot. I feel we could sit down and have a drink together, were your story not set during Prohibition. And were you not a pompous buttmunch. If those two things were completely different, just think of the times we could have had together. But alas.

I also got completely confused by the plot a couple times, mainly when the narrative referenced activities that took place off-stage, and I didn’t feel they’d been delineated enough to make sense. Or where Flynn refers to himself by his first name in the middle of a random paragraph.

There are all these pages upon pages of starkly elegant writing, complex and layered and flowing and then BAM! The book will take some odd turn and I lost the plot and wound up wondering if I should go put the laundry in the dryer now.

Case in point? Three-quarters of the way through the book, Flynn is made aware that Julian might be suffering from a potentially fatal degenerative malady. Now, I know you might be asking yourself, which one? Funny thing: I asked myself that too, because this dread lurgy gets referred to over and over and over for ten pages before being revealed. It’s a juvenile and annoying trick that distracts the reader from the engaging romance blossoming between the two main characters.

The mine tragedy subplot is also very poorly handled, as it keeps getting brought up over and over and then abruptly dropped until the next time the reader needs proof of Flynn’s sensitive and sympathetic nature. In this case, the gun on the mantelpiece doesn’t just avoid getting fired, but actually falls on the rug and gets stepped over by everyone passing through the room.

And while I am not going to spoil the mystery for you, I am simply going to say that it’s been at least ten years since an ending to a story ticked me off quite as badly as this one did. I quite literally sat stunned for a few seconds and wondered if I should email the Three Dollar Head Cheese and ask whether I’d gotten a defective file. Really, Josh Lanyon? Really?

But I can forgive a lot of any author who crafts the following sentence: “Julian looked like one of those French aristocrats from the time right before the people got tired of eating cake and started lopping heads.”

Or this description of a barn dance:

In a companionable silence they followed slightly tipsy couples through the warm moonlit night and down a hedge-boarded walkway to the big barn where buttery light streamed into the summer evening, and a jazz band could be heard tentatively warming up.

A couple of St. Louis-style bruisers sized them up inside the entrance, looking them over for flasks or pistol bulges.

Inside the barn, the floor had been polished like black glass. The walls were dark paneled and the lights mellow. A few ceiling fans moved the air languidly overhead.

Dude, that’s a barn dance. A barn dance. It’s just not supposed to be that pretty.

And that right there is the crux of my tale, friends. If you’re a fan of lush settings and lyrical writing, you could do a lot worse than this story. If, however, narrative shortcomings and unlikeable protagonists put you off, stay clear.

I know, that’s less than helpful. But it’s honest and free.