Voice of Our Shadow

That took me by surprise. A fairly straightforward piece of fiction examining a man's life choices and relationships with his complex family and friends. A little bit of weird thrown in as well as it teases a big twist that never seems to come.

Until the final couple of pages which just flips it all on its head.

I like Carroll's writing. He makes the mundane interesting, understands complex character writing and he has this ability to drop bombshells after mid-chapter breaks for maximum impact. He teases and retracts so often it's easy to be lulled into a false sense of security. I think a lot of people probably hated the ending for being shock in its own sake, but for me I think it all worked.

A mix of literary fiction, psychological show more drama, noir and shock horror that I enjoyed more than I expected. show less

This is a weird novel. It's compelling, creepy, lame, uncomfortable; it leaves you wondering if it's going anywhere or just dilly-dallying inside Joseph Lennox's head.

Joe is a horrible, selfish and self-obsessed brat of a narrator--but his voice is also utterly uncomfortable precisely because, in being horrible, he's toeing a line that most of us have difficulty with. E.g., he uses friends for personal gain, all the while convincing himself and his audience that he's playing the Nice Guy, that maybe he's being unjustly victimized.

[N.B. This review includes images, and was formatted for my site, dendrobibliography -- located here.]

A lot of this novel's horror comes from that. He's just a shitty dude. Too human and too me-and-you.

Joe's show more your average romanticized writer living a romanticized life abroad, just with all the romantic notions beaten out of him. He fictionalized his equally-shitty dead brother's teenage exploits while getting his undergrad, and made bank on royalties from Broadway and film adaptations. He spends most of his free time--really, most of his time--living a high-brow literary life with a high-brow literary couple in Vienna. They don't really do anything other than flip witticisms back and forth and talk about how much they all care for one another at classic American movie showings.

Yeah. It's a real weird one. I liked it, and I didn't. I spent the novel feeling a bizarre concoction of captivation and anxiety, or just really pissed off. Most of what pissed me off was just how uninteresting the characters were: They spent too much time being walking witticisms and breathing in self-importance. They're social parasites to the letter.

What really captivated me was Carroll's writing style; how everything through Joe's eyes was just off-white, including the horror elements delivered in quick, unexplained punches. It's something that kept my heart thumping away, on edge, and a little confused as to why.

"Little Boy" is creepy. Any scene with those floppy cartoon gloves and their floppy reality had me reeling. *shiver*

Voice of Our Shadow feels disconnected. Its 3 short acts feel like 3 short novellas about the same characters. The connecting threads of love and dishonesty and juvenile betrayal honestly don't hold it together very well, and most of its mythic structure is, like the supernatural goings-on and shitty Joe Lennox, slightly off and yet totally real.

What a weird book--especially the ending. It goes off with what's most easily described as a punchline--a punchline that'll leave you thinking "What...? Huh? Wait..." one or two or eleven times. Yeah: I don't know. What a weird danged book. show less

OK, Karen! I just finished getting caught up on reviews so I could justify reviewing this one.

Many of my followers likely know of my love affair with [a:Jonathan Carroll|23704|Jonathan Carroll|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1222900262p2/23704.jpg] books. His writing enthralls me, his imagination consumes me, and his creativity and utterly shameless writing style are something I aspire to. Every world hat he creates is something wholly new and unexpected, yet at once so familiar as to be slipped into like a separate skin. Reading his books is an experience, and an addiction. For those who his writing works for, it's a love that will last for a lifetime. Otherwise, you likely despise him. He's a polarizing author.

[b:Voice of Our show more Shadow|42147|Voice of Our Shadow|Jonathan Carroll|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1386925378s/42147.jpg|968926] is a very strange book. It lures the reader into a false sense of security with its initial linear narrative, its logical, if surprising conclusions. This solid foundation serves as a firm jumping off point. Potential murder, madness, a tantalizing love affair, death... It all winds together and when you look at it sideways, falls into place. Could the ending have been anything but what it turned out to be? No, not really. The more I sit with it, the more sense it makes.

It's like a magic trick. Here is one way to look at things, and now it's a metaphor. But wait, there's more. Have you considered this? Everything is based on the opening chapters, and it's brilliant. [a:Jonathan Carroll|23704|Jonathan Carroll|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1222900262p2/23704.jpg] is one of the strangest authors I've read, but also one of the smartest. He forces you to see through his eyes and to follow his singular footsteps into his dreams. They're odd dreams, frightening dreams, but unmistakably beautiful dreams all the same. show less

Joe Lennox, a young American working in Vienna, still full of guilt over the death of his brother over a decade before, becomes friends with an older married couple, Paul and India Tate, who are also ex-pats. The story starts off like a non-genre novel and nothing even slightly impossible happens until the half-way point when it becomes an unusual ghost story. Towards the end, I was wondering how the story could ever be wrapped up in the last few pages, and then there was an unexpected twist and it was all over in two pages - a truly surprise ending!

Unfortunately I took an instant dislike to the protagonist which I never got over. None of his relationships rang true, although this could well be explained by the surprise ending, or show more possibly due to those relationships being all in his mind. Could it be that Joe was mentally ill, and rather than being pursued by vengeful ghosts, he was torturing himself with his guilt over having caused his brother's death? Thinking back over it, whenever he was with India and Paul, and later with Karen, they always did things by themselves, never with other friends, so no-one else Joe knew (not that he seems to have known many people) would ever have met them, so they could well have been figments of his imagination. Even the funeral was poorly attended and I didn't think he spoke to anyone else there either. show less

[Three and 1/2 stars]
Another swift and interesting read from Jonathan Carroll, with another self-centred, intelligent, not-entirely-sympathetic-but-all-too-human protagonist. Not as polished or creepy as Land of Laughs, but with the same facility for description and nuanced study of character and the permutations of relationships. But most of all, I'm actually still trying to digest that ending! I can't decide whether it's as abrupt and out of the blue as it feels (just as the character has no room to think in those crucial last three pages, neither does the reader), or if it makes sense thematically. A bit of both, I think, and the whole book now definitely requires a re-read.

An easy read and a rather deceptive book. It starts off a bit like a Stephen King novel, with the well realised horrible and sadistic elder brother Ross tormenting the younger one Joseph/Joe who is the novel's protagonist and first person narrator, and the tragic accident which inevitably results. Joe then suffers years of guilt though this doesn't stop him using the character of his brother and his brother's wrong-side-of-the-tracks friend as characters in a short story, which becomes a best selling play, although the play bears little resemblance to his story. So he feels a bit of a fraud/failure. Possibly he isn't meant to be much of a sympathetic character and this plundering of his own background may be a clue to that, but then as show more he says, writers do that.

The book then changes tack with the introduction of India and Paul Tate, two fellow Americans whom Joseph meets while living in Vienna. It is totally obvious from moment one that he and India will end up having an affair. The strange element of the book starts to creep in when they introduce Joe to Paul's alter ego, Little Boy. In this guise Paul performs magic tricks which appear to have no logical explanation, e.g. mechanical birds that manage to fly. One horrible element for bird lovers is where a flesh and blood bird is seemingly set on fire as part of this magical act.

When Paul goes away on business, he urges Joe to look after India. Although they resist the temptation to jump into bed, both feel a strong attraction, and when Paul returns he accuses them of betraying him, and his Little Boy persona starts to take over. He seems to be having a breakdown. Under the pressure of all this, Joe and India actually do start an affair.

The truly weird part of the story follows when Paul dies and proceeds to haunt his widow and Joe in the form of Little Boy, so that horrible things start happening . When it becomes clear that their relationship can't continue, Joe goes back to New York where he meets a young woman, Karen, and falls for her. His meeting with her is rather peculiar and this may be meant to tip us off that all is not right with her. She proceeds to vacillate between Joe whom she claims to love and a former boyfriend, Miles, who we never see in person, but when Joe receives a call from India telling him that Paul's hauntings have become unbearable and that she needs him to return, Karen in effect tells Joe that Miles is likely to take his place during his absence. Feeling torn between duty to India, whom he realises he didn't actually love, and his love for Karen, Joe returns to Vienna.

In the final act, Paul seems to call off his dogs (after they have become literal), but it seems this was just a ploy. India turns on Joe who has told her about Karen, and rips his character to shreds, accusing him of being a parasite who lives off the life energy of others. Joe is deeply hurt but still rushes to her apartment later only to discover in what I found a totally unbelievable ending that his dead brother Ross is actually behind it all and is using the Tates as puppets in effect. Then Karen appears, and she turns out to be a thing his brother has created also. It's not clear if any of them were ever real in any sense, or whether Ross animated them in reality.

So this book, although a good page turning read, turns out to be rather unsatisfactory. I really couldn't relate to the ending which overturns everything that has gone before in a few short pages: is it all in Joe's mind and is his final retreat to a quiet Greek island just a breakdown in effect, or was there substance in the events? And was the final scene in Vienna the truth, and if so, why did the perpetrator wait so long for his revenge? show less

Joseph Lennox is a young, successful writer who is emotionally haunted by a childhood incident in which he somewhat accidentally caused his older brother's death. Against the backdrop of Vienna, the lonely young man meets an older couple with whom he develops an obsessively immersive friendship... I don't want to give too much away, but the scenario (about half way through the book) develops into a fairly tense and horrific ghost story. (although the book cover bills this as fantasy, I would definitely describe it more as 'literary horror'). However, I figured out the 'twist ending' fairly early - and although I guessed at it, I don't think it worked very well. Not all of the events and emotional turns of the characters' relationships show more make sense with the ending.
This was the second Jonathan Carroll book I've read, and I haven't really loved either of them, although he's quite critically acclaimed. What can I say? (I also read Bones of the Moon) show less