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By Mickey Pearlman  |  May 29, 2005  Deceit and Disaster Down East

Sunday, April 24, 2005  BOOK REVIEW

"Thayer's 'Lunacy' puts human spirit to a terrifying test" by Nancy Grape.

South Florida Feb 20, 2005
"When chaos collides with a cozy life."  By Delmarie Martínez  Special Correspondent Posted February 20 2005. Click here to read review.

Thomas Allen & Son Limited.  Click here to see what Thomas Allen is saying about "A Brief Lunacy"

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Carl and Jessie Jensen are enjoying their retirement in the remote reaches of Maine until a stranded camper named Jonah arrives at their front door. While the kindhearted couple senses menace in the young man's eyes, they invite him to stay for dinner and spend the night. (Both wonder if Jonah is a friend of their mentally troubled daughter, Sylvie, who escaped from an area psychiatric home earlier that day.) The Jensens' worst fears are confirmed the following morning, as Jonah takes the pair hostage, insistent that he is fulfilling the wishes of God.

The simmering scenario reaches a rolling boil as Jonah forces Carl, a French Gypsy who survived the Nazi concentration camps, to explain the patchwork of scars on his back and the German inscription on his violin. Jessie, meanwhile, plays mind games with Jonah as she furiously searches for a means of escape. Maine resident Thayer--Strong for Potatoes (1999), A Certain Slant of Light (2001)--creates relentless suspense in this taut literary chiller that pits the mad against the sane.
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-Allison Block

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Story of a startling, revelatory night of violence for a quiet retired couple who shelter a young psychotic camper. Thayer (A Certain Slant of Light, 2000) seems determined to flex her novelistic muscles, though her narrative starts tranquilly enough, with our close, elderly couple setting out in the bucolic October morning to paint watercolors of pines and mushrooms: Jessica taught years of high-school history, while her husband, Carl, a Holocaust survivor, is a retired surgeon. Their three grown children have mostly entered the wider world, except the oldest, Sylvie, who is schizophrenic and living in a nursing home some miles away. Little by little, details of the daughter's dangerously erratic behavior over the years emerge before the home calls to say that Sylvie has run off with another inmate, her boyfriend. There's already a note of panic in the house when the lost "camper" appears at the door and pleads to spend the night. Jonah is an insomniac and increasingly unstable; he seizes Carl's gun, ties him to a chair, and proceeds to get to "know" the couple intimately because that's what the Lord (and Sylvie, his girlfriend) tells him to do.

The tale grows increasingly deranged as Jonah fixates on Carl's concentration-camp tattoo, and a whole graphic saga of his true Gypsy identity and horrific escape from Birkenau is wrenchingly revealed. Safety seems key to the novel--the safety of feeling loved and sheltered, the safety of hiding behind weakness, and the safety of inventing pretty stories to make a life more palatable. All of which Thayer challenges admirably, but her determined aim to shock through violence borders on the gratuitous. She has a maddeningly deliberative style ("I gather bones of dead animals," says Jessie. "Why? I don't know"), which is effective in building suspense, but Jessie's final cold-blooded act seems almost tit-for-tat, making her story as significant as Carl's. A tale told in chilling crescendo.  Agent: Sandy Choron/March Tenth

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An act of kindness leads to horrors in a sober, wrenching literary thriller. Carl and Jessie, a long-married and loving couple, are enjoying a quiet retirement in their isolated Maine house. Their one real worry is their schizophrenic, institutionalized daughter, Sylvie, who one day calls to say that she has run away from her facility. As the couple worries about Sylvie, a young man calling himself Jonah appears, claiming that his camping gear was stolen from a nearby site. Ignoring Carl's wariness, Jessie offers Jonah a bed for the night; Jonah responds by taking them hostage in their home. Jonah, they eventually learn, is Sylvie's boyfriend from the facility, a schizophrenic who plays a torturous series of psychological games with the couple that bring dark family histories to light.

Thayer (Strong for Potatoes; A Certain Slant of Light ) underplays the more lurid aspects of her story line, choosing instead to generate tension with dialogue and taut, well-crafted scenes as Carl and Jessie try to escape and Jonah's behavior careens toward deadly violence. Sylvie's eerie presence hovers in the background throughout, and the climax features a revelation about Carl that completely changes Jessie's impression of her protective, gentle husband. The dark suspense in this concentrated psychological character study makes for a genuine page-turner. Agent, Sandy Choron. (Mar.)

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lr 2005 4.25PVA