Synopsis: Following a near-dear experience as a child, the narrator becomes cursed with the ability to foresee the deaths of people closest to him. These visions come to him in his dreams and, following a disastrous attempt to save a friend from drowning, a series of terrifying events begins to unfold. As a young man he finds redemption in the arms of Ashling, his beautiful wife. But then the visions return… This is a story about one man’s struggle to live an ordinary life in extraordinary circumsstances; about love lost and found and the vast range of emotions that can be weathered by the human heart. This is a story where dreams come true but where dreams can turn into nightmares; a place where true love will prevail and where death is only the beginning.
This sounds like a sapping romance or motivational fiction (see: Mitch Albom). But it’s not. It is sentimental, aw right, but couched in funny words. I’m a sucker for hilarious similes and analogies and this book is filled with those. Consider the follow examples:
“The judge was a cantankerous old bastard who had a hard drinker’s red nose and massive jowls. I remember thinking that if his entire body from neck down got toasted in a fire, a plastic surgeon could probably have grafted the skin from his jowls to cover the whole of his body.” (p.66)
“I head someone say once that love is like people’s mothers: everyone thinks that theirs is the best.” (p.116)
“Later I caught sight of myself in the mirror and I almost smiled at the sate of the face looking back at me. Sunken grey eyes peered out from a face I didn’t recognise and I looked as if I had lost about two stone in weight. They wouldn’t have sold me glue in a hardware store looking like that.” (p. 165)
There’s this wry bitchy humor that I really enjoy. Reading this book felt a little like reading Running With Scissors, all that psychological breakdown and delinquency, and of course, wicked similes. I love good and funny similies like these. It speaks much more to me, in all its extraction of stereotypes, compared to a good descriptive paragraph of the exact molecular alignment. That’s how precious similes are to me. That said, I am picky about my similes. Use with caution with me.
