The Jolly Coroner
A Picaresque Novel
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Evil wakes while the people sleep.
Amongst the strip malls, concrete blocks and empty parking lots of the Southern town of Hokum, the American dream lies broken. A helpless immigrant the state has declared dead finds himself unable to prove otherwise. Abused Mexican kids abduct their schoolteacher escaping back across the border. A haunted hillbilly dangles from a flagpole refusing to believe his wife and children aren’t ghosts. The Warden, a camo-wearing military obsessive pedals drugs whilst blaring Stockhausen. A down on her luck junkie fails to drown herself and resurfaces to find love. All these characters have one thing in common: they will all find a way to wind themselves in to the coroner, Billy’s life.
Billy’s love of celebrity and aversion to hard work leaves a growing trail of wronged members of the public – a trail that he just can’t seem to shake. Although he can’t understand why, the townsfolk begin increasingly to mistake him for the devil. Amidst all the fun, THE JOLLY CORONER poses questions about moral decay and proves that a casual string of circumstances, in the right conditions, can lead to the rise of a dangerous man... only it’s so accidental no one seems to notice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the center of this literary crime novel composed of vignette-like chapters is Billy Rubino, a persnickety and self-aggrandizing coroner working in the gritty Southern town of Hokum who may be the devil. Canterel creates a hard-boiled fantasia, delving into the pathology of his characters with relish, including a Polish mathematician whose identity has been confused with that of a corpse, and a group of teenagers who kidnap their teacher, forcing her to drive them across the Mexican border (the teacher falls ludicrously in love with one of her captors). Canterel's prose style swings between heights of hyperbole and verbosity and depths of existentialist despair. Canterel is at his best when making preposterous scenarios and describing the water-logged bayous and depraved establishments of Hokum. When Billy falls in love with a junkie whom he saved from an attempted suicide, the crackling energy at work in Canterel's prose begins to lose its focus, yet his narrative consistently shows a polished command of language and a self-assured style. (BookLife)
