Bonnie Nadzam’s newly released novel, Lions (Grove/Black Cat, $16), is a ghost story–a ghost story about the spirit of a dying Colorado town called Lions, so named “to stand in for disappointment with the wild invention and unreasonable hope by which it had been first imagined, then sought and spuriously claimed.” It is also a story about the ghosts that haunt the town’s few remaining inhabitants: the ghosts of their ancestors, the ghosts of their hopes and ambitions, the ghosts of an uncertain future.
Lions is a bleak place, “comprised of no more than searing light and eddying dust. Nothing but wind and white sun.” Its people eke out meager lives from barren land, and are slowly but surely abandoning their homes to escape–or perhaps to chase–the …show more content…
Tragedy falls upon the unnamed stranger, as well as on the Walker family. Over the course of the summer, Walker’s son, Gordon, and his son’s girlfriend, Leigh, must wrestle with these tragedies, and with life in a place that seems never able to escape its past, never able to move forward toward something better, but instead is “confined to a never-ending present.”
To describe the plot of Lions makes it sound trite, even juvenile, what with ghosts, and curses, and a motley cast of small-town characters. But Lions isn’t a straightforward narrative about rural American. It’s an atmospheric exploration of hope, nostalgia, and a desperate yearning for the unattainable. It is simultaneously comforting in its familiarity, heartbreaking in its inevitability, and haunting in its evocations.
Nadzam’s painterly prose reveals a land that is starkly beautiful, infused with light and color, as magical as it is disturbing. Lions is a place that, if you’re at all familiar with rural America, you’ve likely encountered: a bar, a diner, a closed school, an abandoned factory, a handful of decaying houses and boarded-up storefronts lining a dirt road, a bigger, better town up the road offering happiness in the form of a movie theater, restaurants, and
Lions is a bleak place, “comprised of no more than searing light and eddying dust. Nothing but wind and white sun.” Its people eke out meager lives from barren land, and are slowly but surely abandoning their homes to escape–or perhaps to chase–the …show more content…
Tragedy falls upon the unnamed stranger, as well as on the Walker family. Over the course of the summer, Walker’s son, Gordon, and his son’s girlfriend, Leigh, must wrestle with these tragedies, and with life in a place that seems never able to escape its past, never able to move forward toward something better, but instead is “confined to a never-ending present.”
To describe the plot of Lions makes it sound trite, even juvenile, what with ghosts, and curses, and a motley cast of small-town characters. But Lions isn’t a straightforward narrative about rural American. It’s an atmospheric exploration of hope, nostalgia, and a desperate yearning for the unattainable. It is simultaneously comforting in its familiarity, heartbreaking in its inevitability, and haunting in its evocations.
Nadzam’s painterly prose reveals a land that is starkly beautiful, infused with light and color, as magical as it is disturbing. Lions is a place that, if you’re at all familiar with rural America, you’ve likely encountered: a bar, a diner, a closed school, an abandoned factory, a handful of decaying houses and boarded-up storefronts lining a dirt road, a bigger, better town up the road offering happiness in the form of a movie theater, restaurants, and