Egad! I pulled The Branch out of a stack of used paperbacks that I
picked up some months (a year?) ago, and started reading it a couple of
days ago. I picked it up without knowing anything more about it, than
that one of my favorite authors, Mick Resnick, had written it.
When I began reading, I immediately started feeling as if it was set in
the world of The Deep Fix's album, New World's Fair...it just felt so
much like that, it freaked me out.
Solomon Moody Moore runs a huge empire of crime, but a nobody, Jeremiah
the B, wants to take it over. The story starts out in a manner that
gives one no reason to expect anything especially novel, which actually
made me feel comfortable. It didn't take terribly long, before I
started wondering, "what the *****?", because things did not progress at
all the way I expected...but it kept me enthralled, to the point where I
didn't care about getting some things done that I'd promised myself to
do. I learned more about some religious questions than I'd had any
particular interest in learning, but that just made the story that much
more fascinating. I'm quite certain that many people will find some of
the aspects of the story to be fairly uncomfortable, and others outright
disgusting. But it never falters, never fails to entertain. After a
certain point, I found it fairly well impossible to stop reading...not
too long into it, I must admit. Even when I started understanding the
premise, I still kept becoming more interested in seeing where it would
take me...and the ending was as unexpected, as any of the rest of the
story.
I don't care who you are, you should read this book, at least once.
Oh, I should mention, if you are to enjoy it the way I have, uncork a
bottle of Allagash Four, smoke a bowl (and start out with
sleep-deprived), listen to Tom Smith & The Flash Girls while reading,
and don't forget to follow up the Allagash with a couple varieties of
Ephémére......
Now, I'm going to start in on Steve Perry's "The Musashi Flex" (I think
this is new to me, hard to tell until I start reading it).
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