Under the Harrow

An excellent novel, weighing in at 500+ pages but too tidy to be called "sprawling", it's one of the few recent books that manage originality without taking the easier path of "left turn into the seriously weird." (Not, mind you, that I have anything against the seriously weird.) It's part "Dickensian" and part "thriller", but it's not a "Dickensian Thriller". The writing is solid - few writers could manage 500 pages without hitting a wrong note,, but Mr. Dunn's orchestra is well tuned. ( )

This definitely ranks third under Ella Minnow Pea and Ibid, but it was enjoyable. My main complaint was the ridiculous black and white characters. There were good guys, and bad guys, and the good guy who becomes a bad guy and then goes back to being a good guy. Very predictable and disappointing. ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

This oversized novel has gotten a bad rap from a lot of reviewers, from being unfavorably compared to other projects for which it shouldn't; it's not exactly a ripoff of The Truman Show, although it shares one of its elements, and it's not exactly a ripoff of M. Night Shyamalen's The Village, despite sharing an element of that, and it's not exactly a steampunk or alt-history novel either, although it certainly feels like both at various moments. Instead, it's a clever epic about a small New England town that seems at first to have come straight out of a James Howard Kunstler post-oil thriller -- one that after an unnamed apocalyptic event has reverted to an insular, pre-tech, Luddite existence, which has had only a copy of the Bible and the complete works of Charles Dickens to guide their arts and culture over the last century, which is why this account of their awakening to the reality of the outside world is written in such delightfully Dickensian prose. The plot itself is best left a surprise, which is why I won't detail any more of it today; but suffice to say that those who enjoy smart and well-done neo-retro genre tales should definitely go out of their way to pick this up.

Out of 10: 8.5 ( )