Customer Reviews

Black Flies: A Novel

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

. . .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 . . .

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.

This book is astounding for such a short novel. The story is amazingly real, and the characters move in and out of shadows almost like they are moving in and out of life. This is a work not to be missed and one to be re-read instead of complaining about the end of American literature.

This is a solid story told in first person about a medic named Ollie Cross, a green medic joining a rough group of medics in Harlem. The story is excellent as the author draws from his own experience as a medic in NYC. The story follows Cross who begins his 14 month career as a medic in Harlem and we watch his spiral from positive green recruit, to his evolution into a disillusioned grizzled veteran of one of the toughest areas to be a medic. You ride along with Cross and his various coworkers (the crass LaFontaine, the idealist Verdis, and the hardened veteran partner Rutkovsky)and their equally varied points of view of being a medic in Harlem. The author does a great job creating tension and build up as these medics jump from gruesome scene to scene all while the people they serve distrust them, mistreat them and plain just don't like them. There is a good amount of dark humor as well. A medic even uses a sock puppet to diagnose an elderly patient. This book really goes to the heart of their thankless job, showing you the guts, gutters and hardships that they must endure day in and day out. I really enjoyed this novel, and I recommend it highly to anyone.

Shannon Burke has written from the heart and the gut about his job as an EMT on a Harlem ambulance team. Only those who have been there can really understand, the rest of us can think we do. I was an Emergency Room Nurse, and I was the recipient of the patients that Shannon and his colleagues would bring in. We loved the medics, they were out there on the front line, the EMT's who really saved the public. Funny and sweet, often with the memories of what they have seen in their eyes as they trooped in. Exhausted from their quest, but always, always polite and thankful they could hand off their patients. We in emergency medicine often see too much, hear too much, it wears on us. We have PTSD from our jobs, it is bound to affect us, all that pain and misery and blood and guts.

Shannon speaks as Ollie, the EMT whose dream is to become a physician. He works in Harlem, the poorest of the poor, cast off equipment, the forgotten it seems. Ollie graduated from Northwestern and his goal was medical school. He didn't make it the first time, so he set to work to learn the real world, while he studied for his exams. You had to prove your worth as an EMT. The others would wait and see how you turned out. If you weren't to their liking you found transfer papers in your mailbox and you left. Ollie had the best of partners, a true mentor. He loved the guy but he couldn't get close. His partner closed him off to his personal life. The rest of the guys were good, some excellent medics, others a little scary- been in the job too long, seen too much. Ollie and his girl, Clara, weren't able to make it. Their lives took different tracks and Ollie became his job.

Shannon Burke has told a remarkable saga in this novel. It is too real and for some, it will curl your hair. The characters are real, we can feel them. The city with its 8 million stories, and we feel like we know the worst part. The lives that change and the lives that are lost. But then there are those that are saved, and that makes it worth everything.

Highly Recommended. prisrob 05-19-09

Safelight: A Novel

Shannon Burke's Black Flies: A Novel is a masterpiece of characterization and plot. Burke, a former paramedic in Harlem, New York, weaves his disjointed plot through a series of in-depth characterizations and vivid event descriptions. He traces the steps rookie Ollie Cross takes as he tries to fit in with the Station 18 crew and still hold onto his dreams of medical school, and along the way he spirals out of control, only to emerge on the other side of a black hole with his first save and a sense of purpose.

Ollie is green according to the other paramedics in his unit, simply because he wants to save lives and is gung-ho about his job. Rutkovsky is assigned as his partner, and he's a hard-nosed paramedic with a military past. LaFontaine is the department nut, while Verdis is his foil, interested in following the book and attending each patient with courtesy and care. Hatsuru is often in the background with a medical text in his hand while they await the next call or are on lunch break, and Marmol and Rivett round out the rest of the crew.

Ollie joins the paramedic unit to gain experience while he studies for the MCATs, hoping to improve his scores and get into medical school. Amidst high crime rates, homelessness, and rampant drug use in the streets of Harlem, these medical professionals strive to save the lives of people some would say are unworthy of saving. This novel examines the struggle these paramedics face daily, regarding split-second decisions that could either save drug addicts who will only end up back on the street strung out or ending their misery by refusing to treat them. The moral imperative driving these paramedics to save lives is constantly tested on the streets.

One fateful event in the novel pushes one of these paramedics over the edge, causing him to lose everything, while leaving the remaining paramedics to rationalize his decision and examine their own moral compass to determine whether that decision is something they all agree with or something that casts a shadow over all of their medical decisions and actions. In a way this decision becomes like so many black flies hovering over Ollie and the rest of the station.

when I picked this book up for the first time I wasn't sure what to expect exactly, but I was taken by storm. I devoured this book in between calls on my ambulance and finished it in about 4 hours in total. it's got some stylistic similarities to Tim O'brien's the things they carried except that it holds together as a single more or less continuos story. at the same time the author has sort of a no holds barred concept which gives the story the same sort of gritty gut punching feeling as a Hubert Selby Jr Novel (Last exit to brooklyn, Requiem for a Dream)...almost all in all this book swept me away and didn't let me go until I was done and I spent the rest of the day leafing through it a reliving my favorite parts of the book because I wasnt quite ready to be done yet. highly recomended

Because the theme and content of these episodes are essentially repetitious, there is no suspense but rather a sense of tedium even with descriptions of the most horrendous acts. The recurring characters themselves are also flat and one dimensional. I believe this book would have worked much better as nonfiction--"fictionalization" seems to have taken the punch out of it.

Since I was trained as an Army paramedic in a previous life, I am drawn to novels and characters who are in that line of work (and much of my writing is impacted by that experience).

The book description for Black Flies by Shannon Burke included a reference to "minimalist intensity," and that's a good term for it. The character recounts intense scenes, but it's almost as if he's a step away from them. Perhaps that was intentional - quite a bit of showing instead of telling here, and with males, there's bound to be less verbalizing of emotions.

But you do get the sense of the main character struggling with the desire to help people versus the forces (and people) that continually want push him down. Burke created a cast of characters that could each have their own story and did impact the main character's personal growth through the book - I thought that was well done.

In the end, it was just a little too dark for my tastes. I guess I'm just a happily-ever-after kind of gal ... Or perhaps I just want to keep my rosy do-gooder view of paramedic work intact!