Overlooked gem

Living closer to Canada than to a Barnes and Noble or Borders, and in a town with an independent store currently contracting shelf space and inventory, browsing for books isn't the mad sport around here it could be. There's a bookstore specializing in remaindered books over in North Conway, which is all the way across the state next to Maine. We live next to Vermont but even so, it's less than an hour and a half drive, and that only because the only road is a two lane twisty thing through the White Mountain National Forest.

I haven't been there in a year or so. But for a long time, and possibly still, they had a number of Hugo Wilcken's hardcover, The Execution. I bought this book when it came out in 2001 after reading an intriguing review in Publishers Weekly.

The thing is, as I started reading it, I didn't like it. I thought the writing was fairly stiff and pedestrian, not ready for prime time. But loathe as I am to stop reading any book I start, I kept going. And discovered a brilliant book that unfortunately, doesn't seem as though many people have heard of it.

Clearly the book has legs, though, with paperback versions still in print. New hardcover copies can be had for less than a buck and a half on Amazon, with used copies lower still. In the ten years of its life, it must have found some sort of audience.

When I say I didn't care for the writing in the beginning, I'm not talking about having to plow through a dense hundred-page chunk like that in Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, another slow starting but ultimately excellent book. It's just the very beginning of the book that seemed cumbersome in the writing, but very shortly, the characters assert themselves and the plot begins to take shape.

I don't like doing plot recaps as reviews, so I won't give one here. What I will say is that this book is a brilliant tale of descent, of a man losing control gradually and relentlessly, of transformation from "normal" to-- something else. There is a murder at the heart of the book, and it is in the aftermath that the interesting things happen; the crime is merely the catalyst for the personal destruction to unfold. Perhaps "unravel" would be a better word.

Every time I saw those copies in that store in North Conway, I had an impulse to buy them all, perhaps to give them to friends. If they could slot it into their X-Boxes, that might be viable, but as it is, probably not so much. The book is so good, the emotional disasters so well drawn, that I wouldn't mind looking at a chunk of shelf space with half a dozen copies keeping each other company. Someone could look at my library and ask, Why do you have so many copies of that book?, and I could say, Take one and find out.

That would be cool but not very likely. My recommendation is to pick up a copy, cheaply or otherwise, read and absorb it, and then let me know if you've felt the same sort of impact. If you're in North Conway, New Hampshire, you could make it an impulse buy (assuming they're still there). Because really, let's face it, I'd never steer you wrong.