From Publishers Weekly
As he did in Things Undone and Alpha Omega, Childers plumbs the fecund world of Southern grotesquery in his third novel, a comic and sympathetic look at an unsuccessful writer yearning for acceptance. Walter Loomis, "never-to-be-tenured assistant professor of English," gets the surprise of his life when he inherits nearly a million dollars from his long-absent father, Edgar, an ex-CIA hand and entrepreneur. The money breaks Walter out of a self-perpetuating cycle of unhappy academia and prompts his return to Helmsville, N.C., where Edgar has left behind Walter's previously unknown half-brother, Ricky, and a sprawling estate. Just when Walter is beginning to settle in, however, he discovers that his father is not as absent as he seems; he has left behind a diary that begins to haunt Walter. Edgar clearly lived with a vigor lacking in Walter. Worse, Walter learns, his father understood this as soon as he read Walter's own fiction. The wild Ricky causes problems too, as does Ricky's girlfriend, Star, who beds multiple generations of Loomises. Childers is best in the satirical mode (a giddy look at the horrors of teaching a creative writing class at an undistinguished Midwestern college is particularly amusing). The dramatic episodes, however, particularly the revelations of Edgar's diary and the clumsy self-evaluation they provoke in Walter, are more functional than moving. Edgar's judgment of his son's writing applies equally to Childer's here: "I must say that [he] has some wit, although his talent is ordinary."
Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From the Inside Flap
The Congregation of the Dead Max Childers In his first two novels, Things Undone and Alpha Omega, Max Childers turned over the rock of Southern rural life and set loose a variety of insects and vermin-in the guise of yuppie lawyers, hypocritical evangelists, a perverted judge and an Elvis imitator. In this novel, Childers returns to the setting of Things Undone. The Congregation of the Dead is a novel that explores the connections between the past and present, family and the individual, and fathers and sons. Walter Looms is a failed writer whose mysterious and long-unseen father leaves a fortune, as well as a brother, and an array of problems, some of which are comic and some which aren't. The Congregation of the Dead is about things we claim to cherish; things that can change us in unanticipated and ominous ways. Back Cover Copy Max Childers is an Associate Professor of English at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, SC. He was a Walter E. Dawkin Fellow at the 1990 Sewanee Writer's Conference and has won a fellowship in fiction writing from the North Carolina Arts and Science Council. Childers lives in Lowell, NC, with his wife Jean and their two sons. He is the author of two previous novels, Things Undone and Alpha Omega.
