It was almost musical, the sound of the ball when Felix hit it on different sections of the bat. The latest report was a sharp high note, and the ball cut through the leaves on its upward streak into the darkness.
A D-flat followed and sailed atop the wind, which bent the branches backward. But the trees settled and straightened when the net caught the ball. No matter how many baseballs Felix drove, the trees danced back into place. James imagined Felix trying to flatten the world with his Louisville Slugger, ceaselessly enduring the leaves whistling back.
James stretched out his limbs to feel large again. He folded his hands together and listened for the next hit. The ball launched into the air and spat through the leaves, and the leaves made whirling circles before they settled back to touch hands again, like paper dolls.
Acknowledgments
Little Beasts was more than ten years in the making, so apologies if I miss anyone in these acknowledgments. First and foremost I’d like to acknowledge my mother, Jeanette McDermott McGevna, for tolerating the too-many years her poet-slacker son lived with her so he could pursue his artistic aims. I’ll also thank my wife, Joanne, for her years of support and for believing in my abilities. My brother, Sean, for lending his freezing art studio one January so I could finish the first draft all those years ago. My sister, Colleen, for lending her ear to my complaints and fears. Thanks to Kaylie Jones for her faith in this project from the first paragraph she read in 2004. Thanks also to Trena Keating, my agent, for her work revising and coaching me through the publication process. My team of hero readers over the years: Danielle Zahm, Adam Penna, Douglas Howard, Elizabeth Cone, Sarah Kain Gutowski, Jack Best, Nina Solomon, Tim McLoughlin, Renette Zimmerly, Tom Borthwick, Robert Knightly, Theasa Tuohy, Annamaria Alfieri, and Laurie Loewenstein. The amazing staff at Mastics-Moriches-Shirley Community Library, where I wrote many pages and conducted almost all my research. I’m indebted to David Wynne and Jerry McGarty for their help with certain descriptions of the sheriff’s eviction. Thanks also to my early influences at William Floyd High School: Bill Pike, Donna Gaspari, Judy Bauer, and Lisa Pantorno-Guzman, who handed me my first creative writing award. Of course, the Fasanello family who continuously lent me their word processor in high school and college, so I could . . . process words. A final thank you to the Poets House in New York City and every single bar, pub, diner, coffee shop, locking bathroom, commuter train, airplane, log cabin, back deck, pool deck, backseat, front seat, front porch, library, and bank vestibule that provided solid surfaces for me to jot down my notes during this amazing odyssey.
E-Book Extras
A Note from the Author
Discussion Guide
From the Notebooks of Matthew McGevna
A Note from Editor Kaylie Jones
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
When I was a little boy my mother taught me to avoid teenagers. I grew up poor, in a working-class town on Long Island called Mastic Beach. With few local activities and even less money to participate in them, teenagers were almost entirely unavoidable. Nevertheless, I did my best to heed her warning. Whenever possible, if I saw a pack of teens hanging at the corner near the local deli, I would change direction or take to the nearby trails.
“That boy would have been graduating high school by now,” my mother would say as I’d be heading out the door to play. That boy’s age would expand, contract, double, triple; I became convinced that my mother didn’t actually know his precise age. That boy was John Pius. That boy, I can say now with certainty, would have been forty-seven, had he not been murdered one spring day in 1979, by four teenagers, who suffocated him by stuffing rocks down his throat. He was thirteen. A local search party found his body near his home in Smithtown, New York, approximately twenty-five miles west of where I grew up.
The Pius murder was a regional sensation. It would evolve into something of a ghost story. A cautionary tale mothers told their kids to keep them from venturing too far from home. I was raised on it. Lived by it. Acted irrationally sometimes because of it.
This became the impetus for my novel Little Beasts. I reimagined the crime, perhaps as a way to capture the nuance of my own underprivileged upbringing—to tell the story of a voiceless people in a voiceless town.
Turnbull is both a modern and provincial town. Set in the early 1980s, the novel takes place while the country is beginning its transition into the technological age, where skilled labor is becoming more commonplace. But unskilled laborers, many of whom only hold a high school diploma, populate Turnbull. Desperate to convince themselves that their lives have value, the residents find solace in notions of patriotism or salvation through God. In what might be considered the third wave of anti-Soviet fervor in America, Turnbull has become enveloped by both fear and pride in the American dream.
This social backdrop sets fifteen-year-old David Westwood, a moody but intelligent teenager, on a collision course with eight-year-old Dallas Darwin. Within forty-eight hours of the novel’s opening, Dallas lies dead from suffocation after what starts out as a mild case of bullying escalates to murder.
The novel is not entirely without hope. In the wake of the murder, the families directly impacted seek ways to cope and move forward. Those moments of salvation come from unlikely sources. In the end, we are left to question the seemingly absurd fragility of life and how violence is often a rippling circle perpetrated by governments, communities, and school districts, eventually rippling outward toward the children. In the midst of this, there are those of us calling out for rescue. Little Beasts captures both the violent storm and the rescue.
—Matthew McGevna
Discussion Guide
1. What are some key details in the early chapters that lead readers to believe Turnbull is a poor town?
2. What does the narrator’s description of each parents’ reaction to their children attending the evictions say about the three main characters and their upbringing?
3. Why do the kids object so strongly to Motor Murray taking away some of the discarded belongings after the sheriff’s eviction?
4. What does revealing that there will be a murder in the early pages of the novel accomplish in terms of plot development and theme?
5. How would you describe Janet Illworth’s reflection on how she first met her husband back in high school? Has her memory of the moment soured? Why?
6. What does David Westwood’s story about running into the cone during gym class suggest about his life? What does it suggest about life in general?
7. Why is James’s determination to build the tree fort important? What might it symbolize?
8. Describe some of the reversals we see in certain characters from who they were at the beginning of the novel, to who they are at the end.
9. Analyze Ivan’s statement that “a thing doesn’t stay ugly forever” using textual evidence that supports this claim.
10. The author has stated, “Violence is often a rippling circle perpetrated by governments, communities, school districts, and eventually rippling outward toward the children. In the midst of this, there are those of us calling out for rescue.” What specific examples can you provide that support this statement. Who, in the novel, is in need of rescue, and do you believe they have been rescued?
FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF MATTHEW MCGEVNA
Writing by hand affords me the opportunity to interact with words, to decide which turn of phrase or sentence structure is clearest—and, in some cases, what makes the most sense to the mind’s ear. In the following scans from my notebook, for example, I originally wrote that Felix thrust his hands into the air, then changed it to threw, but ultimately decided that thrust tickled in alliteration more playfully with the s in his and in hands. This is the physical dance I lead with my words, and I find that I can only accomplish this with handwriting. You’ll also note that I originally penned the opening chapter in past tense. During my revisions I realized a much more immediate presentation was necessary, to first glide above Turnbull like a bird of prey, and then d
ive down into its expansive and beautiful world.
A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
I have watched Matthew McGevna’s developing career with interest. His short stories have always had a luminous quality, a poetic compassion for the underdog, for the disenfranchised, that I have rarely seen in modern literary fiction. You will find no guile or condescension in this brilliant and complex novel. You will only find a downtrodden town and its people, bent and broken by their condition. Yet, despite the squalor and hardship, some do prevail. They, like their author, who came from a town quite similar to the one he describes here, persevere simply through an inert sense of goodness, a faith in a better world.
I’ve come to believe that cynicism is quite easy; it is much harder to maintain compassion and hope when staring darkness in the face. That is what this novel does: it stares down the darkness, and still manages to see glimmers of light.
—Kaylie Jones
MATTHEW McGEVNA was born and raised in Mastic Beach, Long Island. Born of Irish descent, he attended fiction and poetry workshops in Galway, Ireland, through the University of Arkansas Writing Program. He received his MFA in creative writing from Long Island University’s Southampton College in 2002. An award-winning poet, McGevna has also published numerous short stories in various publications, including Long Island Noir, Epiphany, and Confrontation. He currently lives in Center Moriches, New York, with his wife and two sons, Jackson and Dempsey. Little Beasts is his first novel.
ABOUT KAYLIE JONES BOOKS
an Akashic Books imprint
The increasingly commercial nature of mainstream publishing has made it difficult for literary writers to find a home for their more serious, thought-provoking works. Kaylie Jones Books will create a cooperative of dedicated emerging and established writers who will play an integral part in the publishing process, from reading manuscripts, editing, offering advice, to advertising the upcoming publications. The list of brilliant novels unable to find homes within the mainstream is growing every day.
It is our hope to publish books that bravely address serious issues—historical or contemporary—relevant to society today. Just because a book addresses serious topics and may include tragic events does not mean that the narrative cannot be amusing, fast-paced, plot-driven, and lyrical all at once. Our flagship publication, Unmentionables by Laurie Loewenstein, is exactly such a novel. The book takes place in 1917 Illinois, on the verge of US involvement in WWI. While the larger topics are race and women’s suffrage, the characters and their courageous stands against oppression and reactionary bigotry could not be more relevant today.
Kaylie Jones
New York, NY
January 2014
NOW AVAILABLE FROM KAYLIE JONES BOOKS
Unmentionables, by Laurie Loewenstein
"Exceptionally readable and highly recommended."—Library Journal (starred review)
Unmentionables has been selected by the Midwest Independent Booksellers Association as a Midwest Connections pick for January 2014!
"Engaging first work from a writer of evident ability." —Kirkus Reviews
"Marian Elliot Adams’ . . . tale is contagiously enthusiastic." —Publishers Weekly
"Unmentionables starts small and expands to touch Chicago and war-torn France as Laurie Loewenstein weaves multiple points of view together to create a narrative of social change and the stubbornness of the human heart." —Black Heart Magazine
"A historical, feminist romance in the positive senses of all three terms: a realistic evocation of small-town America circa 1917, including its racial tensions; a tale about standing up for the equitable treatment of women; and a story about two lonely people who overcome obstacles, including their own character defects, to find love together." —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"Unmentionables is a sweeping and memorable story of struggle and suffrage, love and redemption . . . Loewenstein has skillfuly woven a story and a cast of characters that will remain in the memory long after the book’s last page has been turned." —New York Journal of Books
Marian Elliot Adams, an outspoken advocate for sensible undergarments for women, sweeps onto the Chautauqua stage under a brown canvas tent on a sweltering August night in 1917, and shocks the gathered town of Emporia with her speech: How can women compete with men in the work place and in life if they are confined by their undergarments? The crowd is further appalled when Marian falls off the stage and sprains her ankle, and is forced to remain among them for a week. As the week passes, she throws into turmoil the town's unspoken rules governing social order, women, and Negroes. The recently widowed newspaper editor Deuce Garland, his lapels glittering with fraternal pins, has always been a community booster, his desire to conform rooted in a legacy of shame--his great-grandfather married a black woman, and the town will never let Deuce forget it, especially not his father-in-law, the owner of the newspaper and Deuce's boss. Deuce and his father-in-law are already at odds, since the old man refuses to allow Deuce's stepdaughter, Helen, to go to Chicago to fight for women's suffrage.
But Marian's arrival shatters Deuce's notions of what is acceptable, versus what is right, and Deuce falls madly in love with the tall activist from New York. During Marian's stay in Emporia, Marian pushes Deuce to become a greater, braver, and more dynamic man than he ever imagined was possible. He takes a stand against his father-in-law by helping Helen escape to Chicago; and he publishes an article exposing the county's oldest farm family as the source of a recent typhoid outbreak, risking his livelihood and reputation. Marian's journey takes her to the frozen mud of France's Picardy region, just beyond the lines, to help destitute villagers as the Great War rages on. Helen, in Chicago, is hired as a streetcar conductor surrounded by bitter men who resent her taking a man's job. Meanwhile, Deuce struggles to make a living and find his place in Emporia's wider community after losing the newspaper.
Marian is a powerful catalyst that forces nineteenth-century Emporia into the twentieth century; but while she agitates for enlightenment and justice, she has little time to consider her own motives and her extreme loneliness. Marian, in the end, must decide if she has the courage to face small-town life, and be known, or continue to be a stranger always passing through.
LAURIE LOEWENSTEIN grew up in the flatlands of western Ohio and now resides in Rochester, NY, where Susan B. Anthony was arrested for voting in 1872.
Unmentionables is available in paperback from our website and in bookstores everywhere. The e-book edition is available wherever e-books are sold.
Sing in the Morning, Cry at Night by Barbara J. Taylor
Named a Best Summer Book for 2014 by Publishers Weekly!
Named a Pick of the Week for the week of June 30th by Publishers Weekly!
“An earnest, well-done historical novel that skillfully blends fact and fiction.” —Publishers Weekly
“A profound story of how one unforeseen event may tear a family apart, but another can just as unexpectedly bring them back together again.” —Publishers Weekly, Best Summer Book for 2014
“A fantastic novel worthy of the greatest accolades. Writing a book about a historical event can be difficult, as is crafting a bestseller, but Barbara J. Taylor is successful at both.” —Downtown Magazine
“Taylor’s careful attention to detail and her deep knowledge of the community and its people give the novel a welcome gravity.” —The Columbus Dispatch
“One of the most compelling books I’ve ever read . . . a haunting story that will stay with the reader long after reading this novel.” —Story Circle Book Reviews
“Rave reviews are pouring in for this historical novel of a family tragedy.” —The Halifax Reader
“This haunting story of tragedy and hope in an early twentieth century mining town is . . . an expertly crafted arrow that shoots straight for the heart. Reminiscent of classics such as How Green Was My Valley . . . this book is a must-read for fans of character-driven, authentic historical fiction.” —Amy Drown Blog
“This is an incr
edibly well written novel that has the kind of historical accuracy and details that make reading historical novels a treasure. . . . Not to be missed.” —She Treads Softly
“The story may have a sad premise, but Taylor convinces the reader to join her in the tale, as we watch bewildered Violet try to find a space in her new world.” —A New Day
“A beautiful, haunting book . . . heartbreaking and moving, and ultimately beautiful.” —Constantly Reading Momma
“No one without a heart as big and warm as Barbara Taylor’s possibly could have written a story about a family tragedy that’s infused with so much hope and love, humor, mystery, and down-to-earth wisdom. This is a book I’ll want to give to people. I could not put it down and can’t wait to be captured again by the next book this wonderful human being writes.” —Beverly Donofrio, author of Astonished: A Story of Evil, Blessings, Grace, and Solace
“Not since reading Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley fifty years ago have I felt such empathy and love through fiction for a place, a time, and a people. Sing in the Morning, Cry at Night is a book of equal power and beauty, a bittersweet tale set in early-twentieth-century Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania, the heart and soul of America’s anthracite coal-mining region, a place where Grace and Grief—now, as then—walk hand in hand.” —Sara Pritchard, author of Help Wanted: Female
“The world of Christian miners—the hard core of the anthracite mining industry in northeast Pennsylvania—is beautifully evoked by Barbara J. Taylor in this remarkable novel. I found myself drawn back to its pages, living deeply in its world as I read. The sense of place—a place I know well, as I grew up there—is vividly realized. This is a lyrical, passionate novel that will hold readers in its thrall. A first-rate debut.” —Jay Parini, author of The Last Station
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