Fallen Land

Starred review from June 3, 2013
Flanery’s engrossing new novel speaks to modern anxieties through themes of loss. In an unnamed Midwestern city, Paul Krovik has lost his business due to incompetence, his home due to foreclosure, and his family due to divorce. Now he lives in a bunker adjoining his former home. Neighbor Louise Washington is being evicted from her home on her family farm, which is being sold off to satisfy debts. Nathaniel Noailles’s family—Boston transplants now living in Paul’s old house—is falling apart, partly due to poltergeistlike nighttime visits from Paul (who emerges in the pantry via a secret tunnel) and partly due to son Copley’s difficulties in a draconian school run by Nathaniel’s employer, the sinister multinational security corporation EKK. Convinced that Copley is responsible for the disturbances in the house, Nathaniel ignores the problems he is having at school. Only Copley’s mother Julia—and Louise—believe the boy is innocent. Flanery (Absolution) excels in depicting psychic anguish. Paul is both disturbing and fascinating, and Copley, helpless in the face of his father’s increasing harshness, is eminently sympathetic. The characters’ struggles culminate in a shocking and memorable denouement. Agent: George Lucas, Inkwell Management.

Starred review from July 1, 2013
The cataclysm at the root of Flanery's (Absolution, 2012) second novel is an act of mob violence 100 years past. Two men are lynched, one white, one black. The deed to the white man's farm falls to the black man's brother, Louise Washington's ancestor. Louise was a teacher; her husband, Donald, farmed, but he was caught between high interest rates and low crop prices. Before he could recover, he died. Now, Louise, evicted by eminent domain, trespasses in her own home. Paul Krovik, an ambitious contractor, secured rights to build Dolores Woods, a McMansion development, on Louise's land. Then the housing bubble burst, the development failed, and Paul was evicted from his model home while also losing his family. In this "dolorous forest of infinite sorrow," Paul lurks in his house's secret basement shelter. From their lairs, these outliers watch Nathaniel and Julia and their boy, Copley, move into Krovik's house. Julia is a research scientist. Nathaniel, reluctant to leave Boston, will be National Director of Offender Rehabilitation for EKK, once into security and incarceration management but now exerting massive influence in areas ranging from biotech to entertainment. Nathaniel and Julia are profession-centered and blind to reality, but Copley, "unfailingly polite, reserved, self-contained, all of his processes and emotions hidden," encounters Paul. No one believes Copley, but Paul, increasingly paranoid, soon surfaces to destroy more dreams than his own. In a literary effort far different from his accomplished debut, Flanery explores family and social mores, cataloging emotional damage tumbling from generation to generation, all woven into a metaphorical tale about the human cost of bubble economics, the undermining of personal freedoms in the name of homeland security and the ugly consequences of the privatization of public service. Characters and back stories are both authentic and chilling, as when EKK's CEO declares "[p]rivate is now public, in the interests of security." In a novel both symbolic and philosophical, Flanery's dark view of human ambition, weakness and complacency is both thoughtful and terrifying. A haunting, layered allegory.

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Starred review from September 1, 2013

In compelling prose, Flanery (Absolution) unveils the insidious growth of defense contractor EKK Corporation into a global big brother intent on managing all aspects of people's lives. At the crux of this intense narrative are Paul Krovik, a failed building contractor whose paranoid delusions have alienated his family and left him holed up and armed in a bunker under the house that he considered his masterpiece, and EKK executive Nathaniel, the usurper who now lives with his wife, Julia, and son, Copley, in Paul's former home. Confusing Copley with his own son, Carson, Krovik steals into the house at night in a misguided effort to watch over the lonely boy. But when Copley warns his parents of this strange presence, they fear for his emotional health. Julia turns to former schoolteacher Louise, the granddaughter of sharecroppers, who inherited the land on which Krovik's planned community was built. Burdened with medical bills after her husband's death, and with her home in foreclosure, Louise needs a place to live, and Copley needs an advocate. VERDICT In alternating chapters, Flanery gives every character a nuanced inner voice, allowing the reader to empathize with, if not fully understand, the actions of each. This is a tense, gut-wrenching take on the American dream gone horribly awry.--Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2013
The land once belonged to Louise's family, but she had to sell it in the wake of her husband's death. Now she watches from the small plot that remains in her possession as Paul Krovik erects his new housing development, beginning with his own home. But Paul's vision is ill-founded, and when he loses everything, he sinks into madness and goes into hiding in a bunker beneath his house. Chasing their own dreams, Julia and Nathaniel buy Paul's foreclosed home and move to the small town with their son. Unaware of the man living below them, they cannot conceive of their danger. As they become increasingly mindful of an unexplainable presence in their home, Nathaniel's reservations about the move grow to the point of insanity, leading them all toward the tragedy hinted at in the novel's beginning. This psychological thriller doesn't stop at suspenseful and chilling, though. Fallen Land deconstructs the American dream to expose its most damning flaws and unsound foundations. The novel is rich in imagery and metaphor, and its conclusions are deeply disturbing. Written with the same elegance and ease demonstrated in Absolution (2012), Flanery's second novel will keep readers riveted from intriguing prelude to stunning finale.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)