Customer Reviews

Cruisers: A Novel

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

 

 

Cruisers can refer both to the car driven by State Trouper Russell Boyd or the two men who cruise thorough this dark novel, Boyd and a wacked out computer techie named Frank Kohler.

Boyd cruises Vermont's highways during the night, chasing down speeders and lawbreakers. He loves his job, but broods about the dangers, knowing that anything can happen when he stops someone. He lives with school teacher Zofia Wira who worries throughout the night about whether or not he'll come home safe and sound. Only when he does, can she relax and start her day.

Kohler is a lonely, damaged and slightly deranged soul who saw his prostitute mother murdered when he was a child. It's a memory that haunts him. How could it not? Like the Beatle's song, he believes all he needs is love and he searches for it with a Russian mail order bride, who is not exactly what he expected. Katryna Kolymov, the bride, has her own agenda, one very different from Frank's, and in the end it pushes him beyond where any sane man would ever go and being that Frank is a man drawn to black, to the dark, when he's pushed, violence is the result.

The book alternates between Russ and Frank's stories, crossing paths just three times, the first when Russ and Zofia accidentally trespass on Frank's land when they are fishing, from that point on, we sense that something bad, something very bad is going to happen, and it's impossible to stop reading. This is a dark book, beautifully written by a masterful storyteller. The characters stay with you long after you've turned the last page, intruding into your night, hanging around throughout the day.

A highway patrolman, a computer repairman, their girlfriends (one from Russia) and some strange side characters all contemplating their every sensation and thought in great detail. The fog gets pretty thick at times and within it a few people are killed, some are terrified and some love weaves though it, both beautiful and sick. I would not have thought I would like such a book, but at the end, it left me with such strong feelings that I had to say it was pretty good - at least a 3.5. It is not so much a mystery, nor a thriller, as it is just a psychological study through which, if we hang in there, we may learn a few things about ourselves

A murdered woman lying by the side of the road, her breasts mutilated; a pregnant Russian mail order bride; a strangely conceived foxhunt; and a black snake - a metaphor for all that is evil - slithering through the rafters of a country cabin. With an almost symphonic force, author Craig Nova brings these seemingly disparate elements together to create a story that is infused with drama, love and tells an evocative tale of loneliness and the isolation of life. The characters in Cruisers are desperate and fraught, trapped in emotional cages of their own making; they're ready to snap, endlessly driven by anger, desperation, and colossal family conflict.

Told in alternating chapters and set in Southern Vermont, Cruisers is a portrait of two men, each battling with his own conflicted soul. Both become the prey and the predator, and together they are irrevocably set upon a collision course with one another. Russell Boyd is a Vermont state trooper having doubts about the risks his night-shift job entails. Every night as he traverses the highways and tickets speeders, he wonders whether there are other possibly more serious offenders out there. Falling into the arms of Zofia, his lover, Russell seeks solace from the rigors of the job. But Zofia, a responsible schoolteacher, knows the inherent dangers of Russell's job and hesitates to make a binding pledge to him.

When Zofia becomes pregnant and considers an abortion, Russell is left with a sense of a collision between common sense and his beliefs about what he should do. He tries to decide just what it was he needs to hang on to - was it his grandfathers love or the certainty of what things are like when they go wrong? Plagued by the ineffectual, and haunted by Zofia's worries, Russell feels powerless to stop the tawdry senselessness of his job, which seems to exist in the memory of colours and the half-frozen landscape. Life has left Russell restless and fatigued so he permanently hangs between the two.

Frank Kohler, a thirty-year-old computer repairman, lives alone in the Vermont woods and patrols his property with a fanaticism that borders on the dangerous. Frank is struggling with a "deep and nameless turmoil" and is driven by the angry memories of his murdered mother. In desperation, he decides that love will save him, but since he's too publicly clumsy to court a woman, he orders a mail-order bride from Russia. Frank constantly lives on the edge and the only reason he has been able to survive is by being careful about what he had led himself to remember.

Frank's sense of fragility, which he detested and his closeness to that abyss of sparkling light, steadily becomes worse. Racked with life's claustrophobia, Frank's emotional solace though love is futile, because the dye has already been cast. It is though everything about the world that he couldn't get control of had been there when he found his mother murdered. His new-fangled flashy black sports car and his new Russian bride have unfortunately come to late for him.

Nova steadily builds the tension with a subdued but mighty force. Both men are emotionally disconnected, but they ache to reconnect to those they love. Russell, in an effort to solve the mystery of the murdered woman, goes to the hotel where she was last seen. Frank wonders the fields of his property remembering the battered torso of his mother that was found in a box by the local river. At once refrained, but also quite unnerving and powerful, Nova has a formidable noir style that gradually encapsulates the reader, unadulteratingly revealing the steadfast heart of human quandary and insecurity. Mike Leonard March 05.

I am an avid reader during the summer months and came across this book while perusing the book shelves at my favorite bookstore.
Well! Reading this novel was a brand new experience!
The story is gripping, the characters are "real", and my soul just "resonated" to the "words"....the duality of our humaness and lives, the dark and the light, the mundane and the violence, the confusion and the clarity.
Never have I read anything like this before.

I am a new Craig Nova fan.

the mood of cruisers is pretty bleak. the characters are contemplative, and no one ever seems to be in a good mood. the main character, a highway patrolman named russell, seems like a haunted guy...maybe because of his job? i don't think every cop is like that. i wasn't sure whether he is depressed or afraid.

the killer seems to have a similar dispositon, although his troubles come from a really bad childhood. there's no way to know why his wife and russell's girlfriend are so moody. kohler's wife clearly has good reason, but it's not revealed.

This reminds me of a dark thriller movie, maybe something like insomnia. much of the writing seems to be quite deep, but most of it is incomprehensible. craig nova has a good command of the language, but i'm not sure it's possible to really enjoy this book.

I picked this book up on a whim. Once I started to read it I couldn't wait to finish it. Not because I had to know what happened, but because I wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible.

The most important thing about any novel (in my opinion) is having characters you can sink your teeth into. Characters who jump to life, right off the page.

This book completely lacks that. Never have I cared LESS for main characters in a book as I did with Russel Boyd and Frank Kohler.

Russel is a State Trooper. Brooding with very little to say.
Frank Kohler is a computer repairman more or less who comes from a horrible childhood and is looking for love.

Both characters are extremely depressing to read. The constant back and forth about how they're feeling at any given moment (and beleive me, not a sentence goes by where Nova doesn't wax poetic about how each character feels about the trees outside, the color of the snow, the sound of a coffee maker, etc, etc) is confusing and totally takes you out of the story.

And there's really not much of a story. Kohler's the 'bad guy', Boyd's the 'good guy', their paths meet several times, an event happens, end of story.

This book is almost written as if it's two different stories. One about Boyd and his relationship and how his job affects that, and the other about Kohler's demons and his quest for love (or just companionship as the case may be). The stories intertwine and come to a definite, if not anticlimactic, conclusion but each separate story just isn't that interesting.

Another problem I had with the book was the dialogue, or shoud I say lack thereof. Novak goes to great lengths to describe what each character is feeling, but there's very little interplay between the characters. When the do interact and have dialogue there's a LOT of 'I don't know' or 'I guess' and 'Yes'.

This review may seem a little harsh, and I apologize for that. It's not my intention to slam the author or anything. I'm just trying to convey how much I disliked this book.