New Book - Slash

Yesterday on the L ride home, I finished Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman. It's Klosterman's first novel, and certainly a departure from his other books. The book is from the third-person point of view of three residents of Owl, a fictional small town in North Dakota, from August 1983 to February 1984: (1) Mitch, a third-string QB on the Owl HS football team, (2) Julia, a new-to-Owl high school teacher who just graduated from Wisconsin, and (3) Horace, a 73-year-old lifelong Owl resident whose wife died many years ago. Each chapter focuses on one of the three, with a random chapter here and there focusing on a minor character. They're lives are loosely interrelated, and Klosterman does a great job of explaining what makes each of them tick. His detail and the back stories are great. The end of the book -- which I'm not at liberty to disclose -- came out of nowhere, which I suppose was the point. All in all, I give a thumbs up to Klosterman's first work of fiction.

My next book is about Saul Hudson co-written by Saul Hudson.