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Visits from the Drowned Girl

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About this listen

 Tower jockey Benny Poteat has seen a lot of things. Working hundreds of feet in the air repairing tension lines and replacing burnt-out bulbs, secured by nothing but a leather harness and carabiners, he's witnessed baptisms, outdoor weddings, dogfights, glorious sunsets, topless sunbathers, fierce storms, raging fires, and plenty more. Not much he sees surprises him, until the day he watches a woman die.

She approaches the river that snakes far below him, sets up a video camera, and walks in to the rushing water, never to reappear. Startled by what he's witnessed and his inability to prevent it, Benny hurries down the tower to the scene of her death. He gathers up her belongings, and doesn't tell a soul about what he saw. Instead, he visits the address on a business card in the drowned girl's bag. He insinuates himself into a life she once lived. Meanwhile, the secret he carries threatens to destroy him.

©2004 Steven Sherrill (P)2004 HighBridge Company Contemporary Fiction Genre Fiction

Critic reviews

"[An] immaculately written, perversely comic novel....Mesmerizing and disturbing." (Booklist)
"[A] funny, bleak and poetic novel....Sherrill paints a wryly humorous, bawdy, scatological panorama of Southern culture....More than that, his limpid, naturalistic prose, woven with symbolic structure and philosophical insinuation, conveys a subtly convincing sense of the enervating voyeurism of modern life." (Publishers Weekly)
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Steven Sherrill is an author of exquisite skill. He has the rare ability to be able to write novels in which not much really happens and yet every detail, every nuance is compelling. Even the most insignificant characters (a cat, for example) is given a back story that is as every bit as interesting as the protagonists.

And then we come to the protagonists. The hero...well, anti-hero as he is clearly utterly, utterly flawed, is so completely human that he is completely believable. We recognise fact that he stands by when he should intervene, and is fascinated by everything that goes wrong for others is something that we all do, whether we admit it or not, somehow makes us care about what happens to him, despite the terrible, terrible things he does. There is no question that this book is deeply disturbing and it is disturbing because we can identify with the Benny. Even the ending is true to his character, lacking in heroics or sense of doing the right thing.

Read by Holter Graham in an almost breathless style, this is a work of beauty. Hideous beauty.

Way In Over One's Head

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