Thornburg is one of the great literary talents of the late twentieth
century. Too bad that he is not more well-known. Everything he has
published is top-notch stuff just filled with excellence. There are some
themes in Lion at the Door that carry over from Thornburg's earlier
works including two diametrically different cousins bound together by
some strange loyalty (often Thornburg uses brothers), triangular
relationships between the cousins and women, amateurs getting
involved over their heads in dealings with the criminal element, and
rootlessness, disconnectedness, and the feeling that you are at the
edge of the continent and there's not much more room left to protect
one from falling off the edge and drowning.

To me, Thornburgh's talent is found not so much in his plotting, but in
the development of his characters. Here, he gives us the rootless
drifter without a real home or a real job that Thornburg weaves into so
many of his plots. You have the power couple, perfectly coiffed,
perfectly dressed for every occasion, and on the road to limitless
financial success. The two of them (Diane and Ken or Barbie and Ken if
you will) turn heads where've they go and seduce everyone around
them without even half trying. But how solid are they really and whatever makes them tick when their world could fall apart any minute? And
how rooted are they really when its Diane's money that makes the
whole thing turn.

You have the straight ahead juxtaposition of settled successful life and
the blue collar cousin who lost the family farm and has nowhere
particular to go or any particular job to go to. You also have the trailer-
park trash blonde girl with the abusive boyfriend who runs around in a
mickey mouse t-shirt and can't seem to ever leave. Throw in some
strippers and mafia hoods and dead bodies falling in the road and cars
being run off cliffs and everyone running in fear from the police who
have no clue what's up and there's a story here.

What Thornburgh does with this story is he builds whole lives and
whole worlds and the story is more about the ever shifting
relationships between these men and these women and between the
two cousins themselves more so than it is about a dead body flying
through the air, running from the police, or running from the
hoodlums. Even the setting around Lake Union and Lake Washington in
Seattle seems to fit the story perfectly almost like another character.
The writing is just superb and I found this book really hard to put
down. Highly recommended.
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