Black Flies: A Novel [Paperback]

Shannon Burke (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 21, 2008

Novelist Shannon Burke earned stunning reviews for his debut book, Safelight, and now he returns with the same minimalist intensity in this arresting follow-up. Black Flies is the story of paramedic Ollie Cross and his first year on the job in mid-'90s New York. It is a ground's eye view of life on the streets: the shoot-outs, the bad cops, unhinged medics, the hopeless patients, the dark humor in bizarre circumstances, and one medic's struggle to balance his desire to help against his own growing callousness. It is the story of lives that hang in the balance, and of a single job with a misdiagnosed newborn that sends Cross and his partner into a life-changing struggle between good and evil.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Gunshot wounds, crack pipes and rotting corpses abound in this raw and fascinating novel about Harlem paramedics in the mid-1990s, the second novel from former EMT Burke. Oliver Cross graduated from Northwestern as a middle-class do-gooder. But he and his partner, Rutkovsky, a jaded Vietnam veteran and one of the city's best medics, see enough massive trauma to put Cross on the fast track to deep disillusionment. Of the bizarre, tragic and often shocking emergencies encountered during Cross's rookie tenure, the crisis comes when he and Rutkovsky respond to a call from an abandoned building where a crack-addicted, HIV-positive mother has just given birth to a premature baby, and their handling of the mother and child—believed to be stillborn—will alter the course of both men's lives. Burke is a poet of trauma, and his expert, macabre portrayal takes its toll on the reader just as the job takes its toll on Cross. (May)
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Review

"Burke's evocation of early 1990s New York is dead-on, as is the burnout and despair of paramedics who can't afford to understand or empathize with those they are tasked to treat. No wonder lines are crossed and consequences are enormous." -- Sarah Weinmann, "Picks of the Week"

"Gunshot wounds, crack pipes and rotting corpses abound in this raw and fascinating novel about Harlem paramedics in the mid-1990s, the second novel from former EMT Burke . . . Burke is a poet of trauma, and his expert, macabre portrayal takes its toll on the reader just as the job takes its toll on Cross." -- Publishers Weekly (starred)

"Although Black Flies is a novel, it contains more reflections of lived experience than some memoirs (particularly recent memoirs). Reading this arresting, confrontational book is like reading Dispatches, Michael Herr's indelible account of his years as a reporter in Vietnam." -- Liesl Schillinger, New York Times Book Review

"Burke's evocation of early 1990s New York is dead-on, as is the burnout and despair of paramedics who can't afford to understand or empathize with those they are tasked to treat. No wonder lines are crossed and consequences are enormous." --Sarah Weinmann, "Picks of the Week"

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Soft Skull Press; 3rd edition (May 21, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593761910
• ISBN-13: 978-1593761912
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 6.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #640,230 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gritty Emergency Medicine In NYC, May 24, 2008

By 

C. Hutton "book maven" (East Coast, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Black Flies: A Novel (Paperback)

Mr. Burke has taken circumstances of his own life (as an EMT and as a paramedic) and turned them into this novel. It is fascinating but not for the faint-hearted -- it is graphic in a medical sort of way. "Black Flies" is a page-turner and the reader will finish this brief story in one night. Ollie Cross is a rookie inducted into the macho, burn out world of emergency medicine in an urban setting. I have the feeling that this is a memoir dressed up as a novel.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a dark, riveting, and sure-handed second effort, May 17, 2008

By 

Jonathan E. Evison "Jonathan" (The Bathtub, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Black Flies: A Novel (Paperback)

. . .i lifted an advance readers copy of this book when i was in soft skull's chelsea offices, so i could read it on my flight back to seattle. . . i don't usually do "dark" all that much, i'm kind of a wuss that way-- i could scarcely make it through kosinski's 'the painted bird' because the graphic violence upset my sensitive constitution . . . but burke's novel entranced me from the get go-- in fact, i was rifling through the final pages even as we began to unload. i kept thinking: this is what scorsese was trying to achieve with "bringing in the dead"-- a riveting, wrenching, totally affecting moral tale. burke is masterful with tension, a narrative element which i find sadly lacking in far too much literary fiction . . .

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gritty and Grisly, April 26, 2009

By 

Mike B (CANADA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black Flies: A Novel (Paperback)

This is a very gritty and grisly book describing the paramedics who work on the ambulances in Harlem in New York City. The job is more than draining - it corrodes the lives of most of these workers. They are faced with rescuing many patients who are at the dead-end of society - drug addicts, homeless people, gang members... Most of the public loathe them. It's a thankless job.

The book is narrated from the first-person. The job and the people doing it are vividly described. Like most jobs there are good and bad individuals, but due to the nature of the work the `bad' individuals are empowered and become abusive.

The power of this book is that we feel the narrator being swept in by all aspects of what he encounters on the job. Like most jobs in takes you within its confines and you become submerged within it - like a member of a cult. You become accepted by your co-workers and it is only your co-workers who relate to the unique circumstances of the work environment. As the story progresses the narrator becomes alienated from friends and family - they become outsiders to his working realm, not part of his world. The work becomes so dominate that burn-out symptoms become unrecognizable.

The extreme nature of the paramedics work makes this well worth reading. Unlike many other works of fiction we are not burdened with an over excess of words and pages.