15) Blind Voices, by Tom Reamy
Picked this up two years ago at Worldcon after very much enjoying Reamy's collection, San Diego Lightfoot Sue and Other Stories, and to be honest there's something tragically compelling about the story of the talented up-and-coming writer who died suddenly, thirty years ago next week, just before his first novel was published.
Blind Voices is set in the same fictional Kansas town that forms the background to several of the short stories, but it doesn't really matter for continuity purposes: a travelling freak show comes to town, and brings sex and death in its wake. Some people have described it as Bradburyesque, but I think Reamy actually does better than Bradbury in some respects – in particular, the tone of horror is more gripping where Bradbury sometimes risks becoming twee. The book was apparently not completely finished at Reamy's death, but this was not obvious to me; there's a little unevenness of pacing, but I'd put that down to it being a first novel. Gripping and memorable.
I’m no Herbert expert, but that strikes me as a rather reductive reading, at least of “The Collar” and of “Love” (if you mean Love III) – the title of “Aaron” at least suggests a reference to priesthood, though I can’t say I’ve read it. But “The Collar” and “Love III” seem to me to be about Herbert’s experience of the Christian life as a whole – of course that included his priesthood, but there’s nothing specifically priestly about them, any lay person could identify with them. I did think, when I first read “The Collar” at school, that the title was a reference to the clerical collar, but of course those didn’t exist then….