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Summary
Summary
As a child growing up in Depression-era rural Virginia, Eddie Alley's quiet life is rooted in the rumors of his mother's witchcraft. But when he's visited by a writer and glamorous photographer researching American folklore for the WPA, the spell of his mother's unorthodox life is violently disrupted, and Eddie is inspired to pursue a future beyond the confines of his dead-end town.
He leaves for New York and becomes a television horror-movie presenter beloved for his kitschy comedy. Though expert at softening terror for his young fans, Eddie cannot escape the guilty secrets of his own childhood. When he opens his family's door to a homeless teenager working as an intern at the TV station, the boy's presence not only awakens something in Eddie, but also in his twelve-year-old daughter, Wallis, who has begun to feel a strange kinship to her notorious grandmother. As the ghost stories of one generation infiltrate the next, Wallis and Eddie grapple with the sins of the past to repair their misguided attempts at loyalty and redemption.
In Witches on the Road Tonight , bestselling author Sheri Holman teases out the dark compulsions and desperate longings that blur the line between love and betrayal.
Author Notes
Sheri Holman is the author of A Stolen Tongue , which was translated into thirteen languages; The Dress Lodger , which has sold over 300,000 copies nationally and was named a New York Times Notable Book and one of the New York Public Library's "Books to Remember;" and The Mammoth Cheese , short-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction and named a San Francisco Chronicle and Publishers Weekly Book of the Year. Holman is a founding member and currently serves on the curatorial board of The Moth. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.
Visit her website at sheriholman.com
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Holman (The Dress Lodger) investigates a dynasty of fear, mysticism, guilt, and love, beginning in Depression-era Appalachia through to contemporary Manhattan, in her uneven but heartbreaking latest. In 1940, Eddie Alley is a shy boy living in rural Virginia with his mother, Cora, who is dogged by rumors of witchcraft. A visit from a writer and photographer from the WPA opens Eddie's eyes to the possibilities outside his tiny town, starting him on the path to becoming Captain Casket, a cartoonish TV horror movie presenter. But beneath Captain Casket's makeup and kitsch lurk secrets and tortures waiting to burst out. Holman dodges back and forth over a 70-year period, checking in on Eddie, Cora, Eddie's daughter Wallis, and homeless teenager Jasper, whom Eddie takes in and acts as a reluctant lynchpin for a tortuous familial would-be love triangle. Though the story flags in the middle section, it does recover in time to map out the devastating consequences of sin and circumstance that were forged in the hills of Appalachia and tumbled down through the generations. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
In the time it took to dash from a cornfield playground, Eddie Alley's world turned upside down. A car, rare in the mountain hollows of 1940s Virginia, clipped Eddie as he ran from his taunting friends. Its driver, a slick New York writer accompanied by his glamorous girlfriend, shepherds Eddie to his mountain cabin to await his mother's return. It would have been better for all concerned, though, if Eddie had been left by the side of the road, because his mother is known for her sorcery. Too late, the writer falls under her spell, but not before mesmerizing Eddie with the novelty of his hand-cranked movie projector and rare footage of a silent horror movie. Thirty years later, as a two-bit celebrity host of a campy, late-night TV creep show, Eddie is forced to reconcile the dark events of his past when a young boy comes into his care. Vibrantly atmospheric, Holman's stealthily ambiguous novel of suspense glitters with the force of sins and indiscretions unbounded by time.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IT'S October 1940 and Tucker, a writer, and his photographer girlfriend are on an assignment for the W.P.A., chronicling the landmarks and local history of Virginia. Driving along a dusty mountain road, they accidentally knock down a child. Though he seems unhurt, they feel responsible and insist on taking him back to the dismal, isolated shack in the middle of the woods where the boy, Eddie, lives with his mother, Cora. With night drawing in, the glamorous pair - who have clearly dazzled young Eddie - accept Cora's offer of a bed for the night. Hoping to cheer the boy up, Tucker fetches an old hand-cranked projector from his car and shows Eddie the first horror movie he's ever seen, "Frankenstein." The film will change the course of Eddie's life, inspiring him to run away and start hanging around a local television station, eventually becoming the well-known host of a comic horror show for children. But the night also proves weirdly fateful for Tucker, who finds himself in the woods, turned into a "milky beast with flaring nostrils and the rolling eyes of a horse," surrendering "to the pleasure of being ridden" by a "vision of blood and sinew." This turns out to be Cora, who divulges that sorcery runs in her family. "Once witches slip in," she coyly explains, "they're hard to get rid of." It's undeniably impressive that Sheri Holman manages to make a scene like this completely credible. Her prose, at first glance irksomely voluminous (she never uses one word where four will do) somehow manages to make the most extravagant ideas seem both vivid and likely. She also boasts a fine, Gothic imagination, summoning fragments of visceral detail at will: a man's comb with a "spine of white, compressed dandruff" or the way a witch wriggles back into her human skin, into the "soft folds of empty arms and legs." Holman evokes the blur between the real and the supernatural as if it were the most straightforward thing, a knack possessed by few writers, though Alice Hoffman immediately springs to mind. As with any story that purports to be about the dark and mysterious powers of women, this is really a novel about the sticky complexities of sexual identity and longing. While making his reputation as the TV personage Captain Casket, Eddie marries and has a daughter, Wallis. He and his wife provide a home for Jasper, a homeless teenager who ends up assisting on Eddie's show. Torn between jealousy and pubescent yearning, 12-year-old Wallis, who seems to have inherited her grandmother Cora's instinct for sorcery, fiddles with a few spells to make Jasper love her. But it becomes increasingly and chillingly obvious that he has sexual designs on someone else: her father. To tell more of the story would spoil it, but suffice it to say that the adult Wallis, the host of a successful television news program in New York, finds the physical and emotional repercussions of this love triangle coming back to spook her. The problem for me was that having been yanked around relentlessly in space and time (the action flits back and forth over about 70 years and several locations), I reached a point where I no longer really cared. Given the dark, dramatic punch of the novel's beginnings in those Virginia woods, maybe it's inevitable that other settings pale in comparison. Though Holman writes fairly convincingly about the urban world of New York, I found myself longing to settle for a while with the same story unfolding in the same time and place. Yet none of the novel's central characters are on the page long enough to be properly convincing. And - maybe because this is where Holman's own interests lie - I found myself more attracted to their childhood incarnations than their adult ones. Meanwhile, other potentially engaging characters, including the likably feisty female photographer at the novel's beginning, are simply dropped, as if Holman had forgotten she ever created them. Least successful and most wearing of all is the clumsy framing device in which Eddie, now near 80 and dying of cancer in his Manhattan apartment, contemplates suicide while looking back on his life - an activity engaged in, as far as I could tell, mainly for the reader's benefit. I had begun the novel with a strong sense of the 8-year-old Eddie, knocked down by that car on that dusty road, but I had no interest in this dying adult and no real means to connect the two. We don't need this elderly Eddie; he sheds no particular light on anything. Holman would have done better to stay with what she does best - those woods, the glorious ambiguity of Cora and her nocturnal jaunts, those tangled tree roots and parched creek beds where the novel springs so magnificently to life. With every jump to another location, I wished we could return there. And, given her talent for exploring the dark vein of magic that runs just beneath our real lives, I suspect part of Holman wished that too. 'Once witches slip in,' one of Holman's backwoods characters explains, 'they're hard to get rid of.' Julie Myerson's latest book is "The Lost Child."
Library Journal Review
This new novel by Holman (Mammoth Cheese) centers on Eddie Alley, raised by his mother in the mountains of rural Virginia during the Depression while his father works away from home. Cora isn't like other mothers-there are rumors that she's a witch. Their isolated life is disrupted when a writer and a photographer working for the WPA arrive in town. They open Eddie's eyes to the wider world, and eventually he leaves Virginia for New York and begins a career in television. Becoming Captain Casket, horror-movie host, he marries and has a daughter, Wallis. When Wallis is 12, the family takes in a troubled teenage boy who unsettles the normalcy of the Alleys and deeply affects Eddie and Wallis. Wallis becomes curious about her mysterious grandmother, and she and Eddie must step back into his strange childhood before they cope with their present. VERDICT Fans of Appalachian fiction and/or novels with supernatural themes should enjoy this eerie, often tense read. [See Prepub Exploded, BookSmack! 9/16/10.]-Shaunna Hunter, -Hampden-Sydney Coll., VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.