Customer Reviews

The Conviction & Subsequent Life of Savior Neck

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The start of this first novel from Albany native and Philadelphia resident reads like a creative writing experiment: deliberate, subversive, and self-contained. "A boy awakes to the smell of death, and for a moment it is his own." After the prologue casts its hook the reader is jerked into the murky, polluted water of the city of Discord and its allegorical, punnishingly named characters like Richie Repetition, Grace X. Machina, and the titular protagonist Savior Neck. Neck stumbles through an absurd philosophical noir from point a to point b and back, getting drunk high or lost along the way. Meanwhile the narrator jumps from a casually lucid, self-referencing third person to a heavily involved character of disreputable origin. Tebordo's sardonic fable about the temporality of life, and the ease with which one can stop living while remaining alive, is never subtle and more than occasionally caustic. The narrator denies the existence of fate while characters are moved, without their volition or even without motivation, like Chinese checkers: they spill throughout the story, jumping around each other and the plot until everything is fit together at the opposite of where it started. In the end we have an existentialist morality play that aspires to, and occasionally brushes against, self-effacing greatness but leaves the reader wondering, "what does it all mean?"