the
n i g h t s ta n d
Ellstrom has moved there with his wife, Nell, as the novel opens; they have a son, but Dr. Ellstrom, it’s soon revealed, isn’t a doctor at all. (He’s more of a charlatan.) Hart lets Jacob, Nell, and the small town’s union organizer, among others, each tell his or her own story in shifting points of view that create a dark, riveting kaleidoscope of a read. It’s also a read that isn’t always easy, though the those who persevere are rewarded with a richly emotional story. Hart acknowledges that he wanted to make The Bully of Order a “complex” novel without making it so dense that readers would be turned off. “My
Time Travel
favorite reading experiences are the ones you have to fight yourself
Hart’s previous novel, Then Came the Evening, has a more contemporary setting
into. That’s happened time and again with books I love—they de-
than his new novel. In The Bully of Order, Hart fully inhabits the late 19th century.
mand more,” Hart says. “If you do the work, you’re even deeper into
“Some of the other historical novels I’ve read have the time stamp, they get the
that world. That’s what I was after.”
facts right, but they’re so boring,” he says. Other recently published historical novels that persuasively pull off the trick of time travel include: Song of the Shank By Jeffrey Renard Allen Based on the actual life of Thomas Wiggins, a blind, autistic slave in antebellum Georgia who became a piano prodigy and international star who played for President James Buchanan, Allen’s novel is wise and imaginative. Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 By Francine Prose Just before the Nazis rose to power, there was a decadent nightclub in Paris where misfits and rebels could gather. At the center of this atmospheric story is dancer, athlete, German spy and race car driver Lou Villars. Everything I Never Told You By Celeste Ng Set in 1977 as a teenage girl is found mysteriously drowned in a lake near an Ohio
Brian Hart, Author of the newly published The Bully of Order.
college town, Ng’s sensitive debut novel is about race and family but Ng keeps the suspense tightly wound as to why a girl who never liked the water rowed herself to the middle of that lake. – C.S. tribeza.com september 2014
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