Empire of Light

April 2, 2018
Bible revisits the teenage years of the visionary Reverend Alvis Maloney, first introduced in the novella Sophia, in this equally brief but less antic work. Maloney is an orphan from rural North Carolina who’s happiest when riding the rails in search of the “vast openness where there was no electric light for miles.” He eventually settles into a foster home in a small town, where he; his next door neighbor, Molly; and the high school’s charismatic football star, Miles, form a special bond: “We talked feverishly in the afternoons about how hard the world was and how we’d like to soften it a bit on the strength of our strangeness.” As Alvis contends with his abusive foster parent and falls in love with Molly, the local golden boy, Miles, chafes against pressure to live up to expectations, dropping out of school and running away from home to crash and self-medicate in the school janitor’s trailer. Interspersed throughout the drug-and-alcohol-fueled narrative are fragments of a poetic fairy tale written by Maloney in which a knight errant and his inamorata, Princess Hypochondria, traverse a desert landscape toward a pulsating “city of electricity beyond the dunes” to combat its ruler, Zorn. In these sections, the young Maloney develops his mythic imagination, translating his adolescent struggles and gnawing guilt for a childhood prank gone wrong into an elemental saga. Bible bathes the dark story of teenage rebellion in an otherworldly light, deepening Maloney’s intriguing mythology.

March 15, 2018
Teenage foster kid Mahoney is back in North Carolina following an extended westerly sojourn. When he got caught smoking a joint in Tennessee, the powers that be sent him back here, to another nowhere town on the way to somewhere better. Mahoney's new foster father is the former mayor, who obsesses over a scale model of their town and expresses disapproval of Mahoney's decisions with his belt. Redeemingly, beautiful Molly and her mother, Mahoney's favorite teacher, live next door. When popular quarterback and Mahoney and Molly's unlikely new best friend, Miles, walks off the field during a big game, the three teens seek haven with the school's janitor, Charlie. Bible's (Sophia, 2015) brief fever dream of a second novel also includes Mahoney's future-history visions of himself, a horse named Forever, and the Princess Hypochondria on a treacherous journey to find an electric city. Benzos aplenty are snorted, and hard truths are revealed in modern cowboy-storyteller Mahoney's ( Of course I lie, he said. But only when I'm telling the truth ) coming-of-age fable.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)