Well it's "best of" season, and the year's best books lists are beginning to roll out, among them the NPR Best Books of 2010; the New York Times' 100 Notable Books list; and AudioFile magazine's Best Audiobooks of 2010 and Best Voices of 2010 lists. In coming weeks, we'll be looking at some of the best of the best that are available on Playaway.
In the meantime, here's a book that hasn't yet shown up on any "best of" lists, but has managed to do reasonably well for itself nonetheless: The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers by Thomas Mullen. If it's not already in your collection, it deserves a look.
This is Mullen's second novel. Both this and the first book were published in print by Random House. Neither book has made the best-seller lists, but each has been a modest mid-list success.
Mullen's debut book, The Last Town On Earth (2006) is on quite a few library shelves. According to WorldCat, about 1,400 libraries hold the print. Over 800 libraries have the audiobook on cassette or CD, and almost that many also have access to the downloadable version from Net Library. (Incidentally, it's also available on Playaway from Recorded Books.)
Somehow the second book, published in January of this year, hasn't caught on with readers to the same extent, despite having captured some pretty positive reviews -- including from the New York Times. It seems destined to be a movie someday, however, so don't be too surprised if interest continues to grow.
Truth be told, it is rather an odd book, concerning itself with the strange story of two bank-robbing brothers who, for reasons they do not understand, find themselves back alive after being killed by the police. The year is 1934, and the brothers' names had been high on the FBI's list of public enemies -- right after John Dillinger.
Reviewers have dubbed the book "magical noir" and a "folktale," and these descriptions may be as good as any. But it's something more as well -- a morality tale about the very hard times of the past and the hard times that may lie ahead.
With 17 bank heists and 5 murders to their names, Jason and Whit, the story's archetypical 30's-era bank robbers, are, archetypically, just on the verge of going straight. Shot dead in an ambush they don't remember, the next thing the pair knows, they are waking up in a police station morgue, unable to account for being alive again. "Shake's a man's unfaith," says one of them. They briefly wonder if they are perhaps in some kind of surreal Flan-O'Brien-type hell, but more practical questions press to the fore. For example: "What are we going to tell ma?"
An amnesiac mystery unfolds as they trace back the turn of events that led them to the morgue. Repeatedly they ask, "What the hell happened?"
And that's exactly the same question the characters and the narrator repeatedly ask about the country as it enters the very worst years of the Great Depression -- what the hell happened? The landscape of the book is littered with boarded up factories, ghost towns, homeless wanderers, and evicted families squatting in the foreclosed houses of their neighbors. They are harder times than the ones in which we now live, but hints of the present day are everywhere: "So many foreclosures, so few buyers."
Despite the current popularity of the living dead, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers is not a zombie book. Rather, it's a very clever, playful investigation of "normalcy" (that classic Depression-era word, invented by Herbert Hoover to describe the good old days) versus the grim new reality of the 1930's. That two machine-gun-toting bank robbers should rise from the dead, the book seems to suggest, isn't any harder to believe than anything else that happened to the country in those years.
Arguably, this is the kind of story that -- in the hands of a skillful narrator -- is actually more enjoyable as an audiobook than on the printed page. Tantor Audio's production features just such a narrator -- William Dufris, whose praises I've sung elsewhere. His voice has a warmth like an old vacuum-tube radio that perfectly evokes the era of the story.
By all means pay attention to those "best of" lists. But don't forget some of those underappreciated works that didn't make the lists -- The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers is one such gem.
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Posted by David Perrotta, MLIS
Playaway Senior Content Strategist
Twitter: david_perrotta
