High as the Horses' Bridles

Adam Grupper does a good job of channeling Josiah Laudermilk, a 7-year-old preacher at a revival meeting in 1980s New York. The youngster projects all the evangelical fervor his preaching family is known for. Fast forward to 2007: No apocalypse has occurred, and he's now Josie, living on the West Coast, estranged from his faith and family. Grupper injects a weary cynicism into Josie's voice as he returns east to make peace with his father, his past, and his history. Finally, the story shifts to 1801 Kentucky, where the family's tradition of evangelical preaching began. Grupper gives personality to the young Laudermilk and to Cotton, the man who saves him, but cannot overcome the story's disjointedness. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine

April 7, 2014
In his debut, Cheshire proves himself nimble with biblical language, integrating its cadence and mystery into his own prose to powerful effect. The book opens in 1980 in Queens, when Josiah Laudermilk, age 12, listens to his church’s reverend hollering from the pulpit about the “sinners’ blood” that will flow at Armageddon. The threat of apocalypse, more so than that of a wrathful God, is the true religion of Josiah’s upbringing. As a promising young preacher, he becomes so enamored of the thought of apocalypse that he abandons his more measured sermons for those presenting a vision of the end of days. Unfortunately, the thunder and lightning of the opening pages soon gives way, jumping ahead 25 years to find “Josie” divorced, depressed, and living in California. Though the novel often cuts back in time, the rest of Josiah’s life, and therefore the novel, remains in the middle distance, neither intimate in its unfolding, nor recounted with any interesting wisdom. Despite the promise of the framework, the prose soon becomes monotonous, with both the implausibly frequent catastrophes as well as the minutiae of Josiah’s day-to-day failing to ever ignite.