Kissing The Beehive [Paperback]

Jonathan Carroll's narratives are constructed like those innocuous-seeming rooms in Doom or Quake, bright and tranquil until the player reaches a hidden trigger-line and swarming horrors erupt from the walls. With Carroll, the trigger- lines are spiritual. A glittering career, an exciting project and a blissful new sexual relationship are generally bad signs, and the narrator has all three. Sam Bayer is a successful writer just emerging from inspirational drought to tackle a real-life story, the mystery of the small-town teenage sexpot whose drowned body he was first to find, when only 15. Was the right man convicted? Meanwhile Bayer's latest lady-love, an obsessive fan of his work, helps, hinders and also scares him with glimpses of her chequered past. An apparent serial killer with a strong interest in the old murder sends Bayer cheerful communications--"Hi Sam!"--uncannily monitoring his daily life and progress. Stalking elusive truths through poignant or baleful childhood memories, our hero feels his life tilting into nightmare. Many Carroll novels twist at this stage into dazzling reinterpretations that invoke magic or madness; here the ultimate surprise is more conventional, even predictable. Not quite top-flight Carroll, but still an unusual and haunting thriller. --David Langford --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

When bestselling novelist Sam Bayer decides it's time he wrote his Great Book, he chooses as his subject the death of a teenage beauty, Pauline Ostrova - the 'Beehive'. The town of Crane's view never felt the same after he discovered her body, floating in the lake, over twenty years before. Her boyfriend, Edward Durant, was arrested for the murder, tried and imprisoned. He died in Sing Sing jail. Sam Bayer's new book will tell her story, bring her to life again, restore something of what the town had lost. But, for Samuel Bayer, the journey into his past becomes a terrifying jolt into the reality of the present. Bayer's gesture of respect to his youth turns sour in the face of all that he unearths; for many of the people close to him, this leads to devastating - and fatal - consequences.

Jonathan Carroll was born in America but has lived most of his adult life in Vienna. His prizewinning novels have been translated into 17 languages.