jcg's review
The Town That Forgot How to Breathe: A Novel by Kenneth J. Harvey
The first part of the book balances delightfully on the cusp between reality and hallucination, but about halfway through it loses its direction. The parts with the army and "Gamma rays detected in sector 7, sir!" read like a bad 1950s science fiction story.
There's really too much going on. There are spirits and troubled relationships and a mysterious illness and electrical distrubances and tsunamis and hallucinations and house-to-house searches and bodies and irrational anger and helicopters and fairies. The author doesn't seem to know what the story is about. Even the title is odd as the town didn't really 'forget' how to breathe, somehow the breathing disturbance has something to do with relationships to people who drowned long ago, but that explanation is buried under microwaves and gamma rays.
The book seems unfocused as the action follows several characters throughout the events, but fewer characters would have made the book tighter - the stories of the policem...more
There's really too much going on. There are spirits and troubled relationships and a mysterious illness and electrical distrubances and tsunamis and hallucinations and house-to-house searches and bodies and irrational anger and helicopters and fairies. The author doesn't seem to know what the story is about. Even the title is odd as the town didn't really 'forget' how to breathe, somehow the breathing disturbance has something to do with relationships to people who drowned long ago, but that explanation is buried under microwaves and gamma rays.
The book seems unfocused as the action follows several characters throughout the events, but fewer characters would have made the book tighter - the stories of the policem...more
