4 Stars - Strongly Recommended to fans of the unconventional / historical fiction but not really
Pgs: 214 (read on Kindle)
Publisher: Mud Luscious Press
Release Date: Nov 15, 2012
Beware readers. The Alligators of Abraham is not a book that is passively read. Written in the strangely comforting second person plural, Kloss sucks you into this novel, dragging you through the dead bodies that are left behind in this war, and our country's obsession with embalming EVERYTHING, and your father's particular brand of CRAZIES after losing his first son and your mother, and the death of Lincoln and the rise of Grant, and the uncontrollable infestation of alligators.
Unlike anything I have read before, and certainly not typical of what I normally read, this war-time explosion of sound and vision moves you beyond the historical and into the inexplicable. God, how often I found myself clawing at the surface for breath as I made my way through these sentences as thick as stew, these emotions forced out of the pixelated text, everywhere I turned was death and destruction and confusion and no way of escaping it.
And there was no escaping your father until he began to forget you, the general who lost his mind and hated you for being alive, the pining for your brother and mother that consumed him and the juices he pushed into his veins, perfecting and practicing for their own.
And the snapping, starving alligators that pulled themselves out of the waters to devour the dead, to pull down the still living, until the living struck back, and hung the alligators from the street lamps, leaving them to eat each other.
A powerful, possessing novel that crawls down into your throat and chokes you from the inside out, The Alligators of Abraham shakes loose the skin of fiction and marches through your streets bare and bloodied and full of rage.
I have been waiting to get this novel into my sweaty little hands ever since Mud Luscious Press premiered it in our Indie Book Buzz series last December and it was worth every agonizing second...
Listen to Robert Kloss as he reads an excerpt from the book.
Then go and give it a read. You will be gasping for air, too. That is a promise.
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