Category: Fantasy Publisher: Annihilation Press
ISBN-10: 0977904911
Type: Fiction
Pages: 336
Copyright: Mar, 2007
ISBN-13: 9780977904914
"Just North of Nowhere" is a contemporary fantasy novel set in a small town in the upper Midwest.
"…diabolical and redemptive, as all great works of dark tale-telling should be. With gratitude to Larry, this jewel is ours. May we use it wisely." -- Nebula Award winning author Richard Chwedyk on "Just North of Nowhere.
Excerpt
"Some really small towns are Siren and Flasher. Crampback, Bumhip and Wetwhistle are others. Those places are to the west. Eastward, you've got Hog Wallow, Smokey's Hole, Blue Ball, Ong's Hat. A half-mile outside Bluffton there's Engine Warm. Now, Engine Warm's just a notion: no people at all. Compared to Engine Warm, Bluffton's not in the same game for small but it's not much."
So begins "Just North of Nowhere," Lawrence Santoro's lyrical exploration of the fantastical, magical, bright and dark town of Bluffton (Pop. 671) in the "Driftless Zone" of the upper Midwest. Bluffton is a town filled with the strange, the wondrous and the downright dangerous: A house that prowls and preys on the curious, a blind man who sees a century ago; a time shifting librarian who wants to rebuild the world, just because she can! The 23 chapters of "Just North of Nowhere," comprise what Ray Bradbury might have called an "accidental" novel and includes Santoro's Bram Stoker Nominated horror phantasmagoria, "God Screamed and Screamed, Then I Ate Him."
Claire S. Cooney "C.S.E. Cooney" KATE THE GREAT'S BOOKS (Chicago, IL, USA)
I HIGHLY recommend "Just North of Nowhere," by Lawrence Santoro. In this sequential novel about Bluffton, a small town in the Driftless -- a back-of-the-hills, dusty, forgotten slice of the midwest -- you may find witches, monsters, aliens, sentient cars... and often do! Fans of Bradbury, King, Faulkner -- rejoice! This book is fun to read for its chapter/story titles alone: "Best Not To Go Where Strange Things Wander," "God Screamed and Screamed, Then I Ate Him," and "'What Do You Know of Death?' Clown Said One Night to the Haunted Boy." Read further and you will find that the secrets of Stregas are not so cut and dry as you might think, that the vigor of lost youth may be renewed by drinking lightning from mason jars, and to look old photographs just a little more closely. Read this and weep... I mean, read this and laugh out loud with delight!
If you took every major epic fantasy that has ever been written and twisted them all into one fantastic tale of magic, sword play, and just plain old fantasy fun, you might get the first half of this 235,000 word monster of a read. The last half is a
