The Desperate Season

Rating:
Summary: The Dynamics of Mental Illness
Review: A stellar literary achievement, this first novel is the illumiating account of a schizo-affective young man, Maurice, who is prematurely released from the psych hospital and the events that occur as he decompensates. The story is ingeniously told through the eyes and voices of several characters important in Maurice's life. His mother, her best friend, his sister, father Nathan, and Vince, an attorney who was the boyfriend of Maurice's mother before he was born tell us about Maurice and themselves.

The perspective of their memories and the events as they unfold are startling and revealing. As events become known secrets about family relationships are revealed and more importantly the perceptions of reality through the minds of each character are brought to light. This allows the reader to postulate the dynamics that created Maurice's pathology.

I am going to definitely keep a lookout for Michel Blaine. He has written a superb foundation for a solid writing career.

Rating:
Summary: The Dynamics of Mental Illness
Review: A stellar literary achievement, this first novel is the illumiating account of a schizo-affective young man, Maurice, who is prematurely released from the psych hospital and the events that occur as he decompensates. The story is ingeniously told through the eyes and voices of several characters important in Maurice's life. His mother, her best friend, his sister, father Nathan, and Vince, an attorney who was the boyfriend of Maurice's mother before he was born tell us about Maurice and themselves.

The perspective of their memories and the events as they unfold are startling and revealing. As events become known secrets about family relationships are revealed and more importantly the perceptions of reality through the minds of each character are brought to light. This allows the reader to postulate the dynamics that created Maurice's pathology.

I am going to definitely keep a lookout for Michel Blaine. He has written a superb foundation for a solid writing career.

Rating:
Summary: The Blaine Witch Project
Review: A veritable masterpiece of word and image--compelling, insightful, and, of course, chilling. The cadence has a remarkable quality, taking the reader for one helluva ride.

Rating:
Summary: Enticingly Scary Read
Review: I echo all the complements due Mr. Blaine. If his book was longer by another 100 pages I would say it would be among the best books I've read all year. His choices are interesting, sexy, sad, finely-tuned. At times while reading this book I thought "There's nothing this guy can't write about." Do yourself a favor: Read it.

Rating:
Summary: A Rip-Snorting Good Read
Review: I find it very amusing how one person from Upstate NY was offended by the sensationalism of this book. The terrain of the book is delineated carefully and authoritatively by someone who has spent much of his time in the region. The ring of truth is everywhere. But if you live up in the rural outback, you're not going to appreciate seeing it depicted as it is--a disorganized, dysfunctional congeries of rootless transients trying to make do with an ugly landscape of muddy roads and convenience stores.

Fiction is most entertaining when it distills hard fact into a pleasant liqueur. Few fiction writers can manage this trick nowadays nowadays, and that's why new nonfiction (books full of facts) consistently outsells fiction (books written by recluses who know very few facts). But sometimes a fictional work opens wide a door to a reality that you want to know more about, and such a book is The Desperate Season. I read it _desperately_ wanting to know more about the rural poor of Upstate New York, strange as that may sound. The mixed-breed "sloughters' in their rusted old cars and inbred habits--who the hell are they? Supposedly there are such people Upstate. I have seen them listed as "slaughters" in an old map of mixed-race peoples in America. I wish Michael Blaine would write a nonfiction follow-up to answer all the questions this book raised!

Rating:
Summary: When poets write novels
Review: I loved the way the words of Mr. Blain's nove flowed. I could see, feel, and sense the conflicts of his characters. The subject matter of the book was disturbing to say the least, however, these are desperate times for our teens. And so much of what we see today in our culture is based upon violence. Mr. Blain's novel takes us on a journer through a highly volitile landscape. And the wintry landscape he sets his story in does much to enhance the sheer power of it's rather complex exposition. Truely a great read. Try it.

Rating:
Summary: When poets write novels
Review: I loved the way the words of Mr. Blain's nove flowed. I could see, feel, and sense the conflicts of his characters. The subject matter of the book was disturbing to say the least, however, these are desperate times for our teens. And so much of what we see today in our culture is based upon violence. Mr. Blain's novel takes us on a journer through a highly volitile landscape. And the wintry landscape he sets his story in does much to enhance the sheer power of it's rather complex exposition. Truely a great read. Try it.

Rating:
Summary: Chilling and Heart Renching
Review: Michael Blaine's "The Desperate Season" is one of those books that will last with the reader a long time after they put it down. Unfortunetly the book lost more stars as I started to think about after I finished. The book is written in a great narrative, with each chapter written in a different character. The characters however are very unlikable from the mentally inbalanced son, too the daughter who just wants to get away from it all.

The story is about the Coleman family whose son Maurice is released from a mental institution too early. He goes to his home town and purchases a gun and then starts looking for his family. The family consists of a covering up Father, an ignoring Mother and a distant Sister. The story jumps back in forth in time and you learn little side sins that all the characters have committed, the reader must try to put all the pieces together to get the true message of the novel.

In total the more I thought about I realized that I missed the message. I didn't understand why Maurice is the way he is, and what crimes have the other familiy members committed to be put into this terror. Even the non-family characters are non-likable and sleazy in there own way. I believe the novel would of been much better if Blaine expanded a little more, for me it just was not enough.

Rating:
Summary: Chilling and Heart Renching
Review: Michael Blaine's "The Desperate Season" is one of those books that will last with the reader a long time after they put it down. Unfortunetly the book lost more stars as I started to think about after I finished. The book is written in a great narrative, with each chapter written in a different character. The characters however are very unlikable from the mentally inbalanced son, too the daughter who just wants to get away from it all.

The story is about the Coleman family whose son Maurice is released from a mental institution too early. He goes to his home town and purchases a gun and then starts looking for his family. The family consists of a covering up Father, an ignoring Mother and a distant Sister. The story jumps back in forth in time and you learn little side sins that all the characters have committed, the reader must try to put all the pieces together to get the true message of the novel.

In total the more I thought about I realized that I missed the message. I didn't understand why Maurice is the way he is, and what crimes have the other familiy members committed to be put into this terror. Even the non-family characters are non-likable and sleazy in there own way. I believe the novel would of been much better if Blaine expanded a little more, for me it just was not enough.

Rating:
Summary: The book has bite, bang and bile. Hang on for a wild ride.
Review: Michael Blaine's The Desperate Season would disturb any reader at any time, but in post-Columbine America, its story of a disturbed young man with firearms unsettles even more. The richness of the book, however, lies not only in the story, but in how it is told. In addition to creating the point of view of this disturbed young man (Maurice Coleman), Blaine makes us privy to the first-person views of the half-dozen or so characters made up of family and friends who have touched Maurice's life in one way or another, and who will pay a heavy price.

By alternating these points of view in different time frames via flashbacks, ranging from minutes to years, the book builds an almost unbearable tension within the reader. If conflict is the stuff of drama, then this book has it in spades; the intricate variety of conflicts we witness in the characters is underscored by a conflict created within ourselves as readers! By deftly exploiting these shifts in time and points of view, the author pits two over-riding narrative desires against each other: the reader's desire to know what happened with the reader's desire to know why it happened. The book is something of the literary equivalent of the Cyclone roller coaster. Hang on for a wild ride.

The Desperate Season is at once both timely in its details of character and place, and timeless in its portrayal of a large and colorful palette of human frailty. Although not without humor, this book breaks your heart, as you cry out, "Oh, No!" in response to the inexorable path its characters must take to tragedy.

Neat, clean, beautifully sculpted prose, richly drawn characters revealing their deepest secrets, desires and fears, and a narrative that moves you to a gripping climax, make The Desperate Season that rarest thing: a new novel that will be around for a long time. A classic.