The Dart League King: A Novel

I was going to stop listening since i found the characters to be unlikeable and low-lifes. When it was revealed that Bryce Haversham was more than a convenience store manager, I saw that more was going to be revealed. In the end, I was drawn in to the web created by the characters which culminated in the storm night of the dart league championships. Morris let each character speak for him/herself and they came to life and as you learned about their struggles, their desires to be more than what was initially revealed, you came to empathize. Morris also painted a picture of the life of the town and the history of everyone there but Bryce and Helen. I'm glad I stuck with it; in the end I found it very compelling and moving, the quite way show more in which each character struggled with something and resolved it. show less

I happen to see a review of this book that touted the authors characters so I requested it from the library. What a great find! I read it in about a day and half. Morris writes about people I could have known so you feel a very personal connection to the story.

Small town characters, drugs, drinking, lives stagnating, secrets, sex, love, hate, father and sons, mothers and daughters, all coming to a head at the bar on dart night with the League Championship on the line. The lives of characters intersect, intertwine, parallel and run head long into each other. The build up chapter by chapter each around a central character was very effective and built suspense that had me turning pages all night.


Morris used character voice very show more effectively, especially Vince Thompson, whose rapid fire, explicative, angry missives were unmistakably that of an unstable mind. Hilariously, Vince went on for a few pages without a period in a rant against first his friend, then his father, mother, and the unfairness of it all.

“...Chuck who, when they were in sixth grade, hit Vince with an iceball on the playground after school and scratched the cornea of his left eye, and then his fucking dad, Vince’s fucking dad, the hardcore Vietnam air force colonel asshole, had said Vince was being a baby and didn’t need a doctor, and before he changed his mind the eye was infected and next thing you know Vince is half blind for the rest of his life and it probably caused his fucking hard-ass father about two goddamn seconds of actual fucking sorrow...”

Each character had a speech pattern or words, a way of expressing themselves that stood out as unique. The plot was not complicated, it wasn’t the story itself that was so compelling, I’d figured out the ending well before I should have, but it was the characters behavior and what they were going to say that kept you reading. I’m really glad I read this book. It felt like something I could use, emulate in way. Not specifically but the character driven aspect appealed to me. show less

At first glance this is a very well-written, humorous, insightful, and fully entertaining story of one night in a small Idaho town. Told in alternating viewpoints, several characters reveal themselves, sometimes in a stream of conciousness that tells of their struggles to exist in the world, the town, with each other, and with themselves. As the story progresses, the beauty of the language surfaces and you realize the book is infused throughout with some wonderful writing that doesn't try to draw attention to itself, but is always there.

Well worth reading. Each chapter is told to the internal monologue of one of a handful of characters who have come, sooner or later, to the night of the big match in the dart league in a small town in Idaho. There is perhaps a touch too much melodrama and the book is occasionally too blunt in its symbolism or foreshadowing, and perhaps the rhythms of the different characters' thought are insufficiently differentiated. But Morris treats his characters with a very nice mix of sympathy and distance, and with good humor in with the moments of drama or foolishness. He traces his characters' thoughts in long loping sentences that modulate deftly through both the characters' changing feelings and thoughts, and the reader's reactions to the show more character in question. There are brief moments of quiet beauty in the book. By the end I at least was quite moved by the book. show less

2012 (my review can be found on the LibraryThing page linked)
http://www.librarything.com/topic/128182#3338899