One thing that I have always loved about reading is its capacity to transport readers. The emotional reaction that a book can cause in readers is really quite remarkable. Tears can be cathartic, laughter uplifting, and terror...well...it depends how you feel about being terrified.
I remember a couple of summers ago, my boyfriend and I went to Cape Cod for a relaxing week to get away from the frenetic, blistering hot city. Both of us love to read and we spent hours on the beach tearing through books. I had just read Cormac McCarthy's
The Road, which, incidentally, is excellent, and had passed it on to my boyfriend. He too loved it and became rapidly engrossed in its post-apocalyptic scenario that seemed distant and just the right amount of titillating against the backdrop of ocean breezes and bright unobstructed beach sunlight. Then night fell. Two New Yorkers, grown accustomed to the sweet lull of garbage trucks and halting city buses at midnight, sat in bed wide-eyed and terrified by the peaceful silence broken only by cicadas and distant breaking waves. That was the night that the isolating terror of
The Road felt a little too transportive.
It's a rainy Monday here in New York City which really set the mood for my latest fearful read. After reading her
other novel, I totally fell in love with the writing style of Laura Kasischke and picked up one of her earlier books,
In A Perfect World. This book details the fall of the world we know in a plot trajectory that eerily mirrors contemporary world events. I ripped through the book in one night optimistically hoping that the title was not ironic and the the warmly depicted characters might just make it against all odds...
Definitely a gripping and haunting read with endearing and flawed characters that make the plausibility of the terrifying hypothetical events even more realistic.
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