Leaving Disneyland
A Novel
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In Alexander Parsons's Leaving Disneyland, Doc Kane is sixteen years into a twenty-year murder sentence. Days away from a parole hearing, he means to get out and start a new life as a Square John--a law-abiding citizen. Within the predatory confines of Tyburn Penitentiary, however, he has debts to pay. To start, Doc has his duties as a "heavy" in the D.C. Blacks, a gang that has protected him. Then there is his new cellmate, a young dealer doing life without parole whose ignorance of the prison's code threatens them both. Finally, there are the guards: Sergeant Grippe, who is bent on "rehabilitating" Doc, and Raven, whose intentions are veiled but no less menacing.
Beyond these dangers, Doc faces a deeper dilemma, one embodied by Dead Earl, a thumbless junkie and reminder of a past Doc would deny. The experience of sixteen years surviving in a violent prison has shaped Doc as profoundly as a river does its course. And if character is fate, Doc's chances for a life on the straight-and-narrow are slim unless he can reshape himself. This, he discovers, is the real struggle. If he's to have any hope for his future, he must first confront his past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Hamlet, Denmark's a prison; in this novel of ghosts, jail cells and the undying past, there are prisons everywhere, which accounts for the aura of bleak misery that hovers over Doc Kane, who killed his son-in-law for beating up his daughter and is now serving time in Tyburn Penitentiary in Nevada. Kane, a member of the D.C. Blacks, is up for parole, but there's a hitch his new cellmate, Byron Cripps, killed a member of Doc's gang, and the other D.C. Blacks in Tyburn have Cripps marked for a quick and violent death. Harassed by a guard and haunted by Dead Earl, the ghost of a man who used to be Doc's runner back when he was a drug dealer, Doc can't escape his past in prison or back in D.C., when he finally makes it home. There's a noirish feel to this novel (which won the 2000 2001 AWP/ Thomas Dunne Books Award), and the question of whether Doc will be able to build a new life for himself or fall into the pit of his old one seems rhetorical at best. Yet the novel is not unremittingly gloomy. From the cadences of prison speech to the rituals of respect and disrespect that mean so much to men with little to live for, all is vividly authentic. With no happy Hallmark card climax, this downbeat, low-key story has an ending to match its uncompromising mood. By keeping the action real and not going over the top, Parsons has produced the novelistic equivalent of a great B-movie, its modest goals expertly realized.
