Furnace Creek cover art

Furnace Creek

A Novel

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Furnace Creek

By: Joseph Allen Boone
Narrated by: Graham Halstead
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About this listen

Taking its inspiration from Great Expectations, this novel teases us with the question of what Pip might have been like had he grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s and faced the explosive social issues—racial injustice, a war abroad, women’s and gay rights, class struggle—that galvanized the world in those decades.

A guilty encounter with an escaped felon, a summer spent working for an eccentric man with a mysterious past, conflicted erotic feelings for his employer’s niece and nephew—these events set the stage for a journey of sexual and moral discovery that takes Newt Seward to New England, Rome, and Paris—all before returning home to confront his life’s many expectations and disappointments.

Deftly combining elements of coming-of-age story, novel of erotic discovery, Southern Gothic fiction, and detection-mystery thriller, Furnace Creek leaps the frame of Dickens’s masterpiece to provide a contemporary meditation on the perils of desire, ambition, love, loss, and family.

©2022 Joseph Allen Boone (P)2022 Blackstone Publishing Coming of Age Genre Fiction
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As a sequel to the Tom Ripley novels this is rather good, if uninventive. The connections with Great Expectations add to the excitement as the plot scurries on - it's always good to know what's going to happen and marvel at the way it's told. And there are very few places where the narrative drags.

As a new version of The Secret History, the characters of this novel uses twins based on Charles and Camilla, features an elderly Julian Morrow, and is told by another hapless version of Richard Pappen. With a black female Henry Winter we have something a little different, and someone who has a very similar ending.

One wonders whether there will ever again be a new plot and new characters in a new novel?

In the postmodern world from which Furnace Creek derives. the answer is no - there will not be. A pity: the writing is rather good.

Patricia Highsmith rides again

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