Customer Reviews

The Dart League King: A Novel

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Morris once again creates characters that are so true and real that it's scarey. From the first pages you become wrapped up in each of these very real characters' lives. The story takes place in one life altering night. All the characters fates are interwoven creating a suspense that builds steadily until the final chapters when you can't put it down. This novel would make an excellent suspense movie!

I always find myself more critical of books I simply pull off the shelf in the bookstore. It's as if they owe me more for their being picked at random, as if their cover were false advertising if they don't sing in my hands. It was with this in mind that I was first skeptical of The Dart League King. Morris' premise is all well and good: small-town guy Russell Harmon lays his self worth on his performance in one dart match with a former dart champion.

But then came the clichés. Russell snorts cocaine on the first page, and reveals his debt to a small-time drug dealer by the third. He lives in his mother's basement and can't hold a steady job. His ex-girlfriend walks into the bar, and Russell repeatedly compares her breasts to grapefruits. By the end of the first chapter I was ready to see if I could return the book to Barnes & Noble, get my money back.

I read on, however, and got hooked. Dart League King is a thriller wearing the bulky overcoat of literary fiction, and once you get past Morris' need to overwrite, it's an entertaining read. The intersections between his characters--one an anal-retentive DEA agent, the next a lovingly psychotic drug dealer--are real and well rendered.

Two elements of the novel left me unsettled long after I put the book down. The first is a gratuitous subplot about a recent college grad embarking on a career as a serial killer. The second is Morris' seeming inability to convincingly write female characters. Beyond the attractive young woman at the bar (she sleeps with two characters in the course of the novel), the only other women here are an all-but-faceless drowning victim and a sexless shrew of a wife. If Morris can write complex and interesting male characters, he ought to give the reader a bit more with his female ones.

All in all, I am glad I picked Dart League King off the shelf. I recommend you do as well, though I can't guarantee you won't suffer some buyer's remorse.

I had many of the similar concerns that other reviewers had with this book; within the beginning pages, it seemed the author was adding superficial depth to the characters. After all, within the first 3 pages, someone was all ready doing a line of coke in the bathroom. The book didn't really seem real because of this.

After about 50 pages, that all changed for me. Each chapter is told through the view point of a certain character within a small town, and with each passing chapter, the characters grow and become more intricate than what it seemed like in the first few pages.

This book is in-between a fast-paced read as well as reflective commentary on the loneliness in our lives. The author does a good job of combining both to make it not only a book hard to put down, but one that allows for real connection with the characters.

I picked up The Dart League King randomly on a "new author" shelf. At first I couldn't put the book down, but as the story dragged on and meandered here and there I found it more and more difficult to plow on through, it almost became a chore. Don't get me wrong the story is intersting, how the characters are intertwined and how the story unfolds, BUT my biggest issue is that for the ENTIRE book, the character's names were used in full, which I found to be incredibly distracting to reading about the meat of the story. After reading on you know who the 5 key characters where last names are not neccesary, it almost made it hard for me to feel like I was able to develop any kind of relationship with the characters.

The Dart League King is a mostly well-written novel that grows increasingly suspenseful and fast paced as the reader progresses through the book. Morris weaves the plot together from the perspectives of several main characters whose lives, the reader will come to realize, are intricately intertwined. The tale begins with Russell, the well-meaning protagonist who is struggling to determine his identity as an adult and is currently willing to settle for being king of his small town dart league. His grasp on this title is threatened by the recent arrival of a former dart professional and an unstable drug dealer upset with Russell's inability to repay his debt. Add to this cast Tristan, a once promising college graduate who's dark secret will come to the forefront of this story, and Kelly, a single mother longing for a way out of this dead-end town.

It is in the development of several of these characters that Morris takes on more than he should have attempted in a story of this modest length. Vince, the drug dealer, is rendered with a heavy hand and I often found myself skimming through some of the longer passages told from his perspective. Brice, the former dart professional, has a unnecessary back story that is largely inconsequential to the events that transpire. The novel would have been better served by providing more depth to the characters of Kelly and Tristan, both of whom lack the complexity that Morris deftly develops in Russell.

The climax of the novel is riveting as Morris takes the reader quickly through the evening of the dart league championship. The conclusion of the novel leaves many questions unanswered, but it provides a firm enough nudge in the right direction that the reader is able to put together the pieces, rather than being left hopelessly adrift. It's rare for an author to achieve the delicate balance between a definitive conclusion and an open-ended question, but Morris gets it right, and the result is very satisfying.

I think this was a great book. The characterizations were fabulous. I really liked the different points of view presented and was hooked on the story. The suspense built all the way through the story, and I could not put it down. It was an very entertaining way to spend a snowy day in New England. You do not have to be a dart player on know anything about darts to enjoy this book>

Morris has a real gift for breathing life into characters. He achieves this by giving them very human aspiration and even more human limitations. Each chapter is written in the voice of one of the main characters and almost all of them are pitch-perfect. To summarize the chracters they are: a lovable loser, a fading prom queen, an intellectual loner, a principled narc and a raging mad dealer (the only character who, for me, was occasionally overdone). Morris puts these five souls on a crash course for one another and give each of them something to want, and in turn something for the readers to cheer for.

I probably wouldn't have picked this book up on my own. As it was, my dad (who is a big dart player) bought it because it had "darts" in the title. He read it, liked it, but also thought that I would like it because of the writing. So he lent it to me, and I sat on it for a couple weeks before I cracked it open.

Initially I wasn't too impressed. Sure, the guy knew darts, but I thought the whole coke thing was just an attempt to give his characters some false sense of depth. However, about fifty pages into the story, there's a drowning scene that just really hit me; really jarred me because the victim had annoyed me, but I was sympathetic. I mean, (and if you've not read the book I'm trying to be as vague as I possibly can so I don't give much away) the lady didn't annoy me so much as I understood the character from whose perspective Morris was writing from in the chapter... but when she drowns... "man," I thought, "how cold."

That point in the story had me re-evaluate my whole opinion of the characters in the book. All of the characters are believable, quirky, a bit gritty, but human. Exception: it took me a while to consider a twenty-three year old a realistic prospect for the head of a dart league; a post normally filled by middle-aged guys.

I'd check out another Keith Morris book in the future.

I picked this book up because I was so impressed with the writing in the early pages. After 50 pp, I was almost ready to give up on it. I was getting tired of the alternating chapters told in a stream-of-consciousness style by multiple characters. I was longing for some straight scenes with description and dialogue etc. But I kept going and became completely drawn into the vividness of these exceptionally drawn characters -- Russell, the early twentysomething struggling to find his way because the only thing he's good at in life is darts; Vince Thompson, his coke-dealer and town outcast who bears an angry grudge against everyone; Tristan, the handsomest boy in town, who gradually becomes unhinged because he didn't report the death of a woman who'd accidentally drowned while swimming with him; Kelly, the prettiest girl in town, who's hoping to use Tristan as her ticket out of their small Idado town with the daughter she bore with Russell (who initially doesn't know he's the dad); and Brice Halberstam, the ex-professional dart player whom Russell has to beat to maintain his status as the town's Dart League King (there's more to Brice's identity, but it would be a spoiler to reveal it). The whole novel takes place the night of the dart tournament and it's amazing how much action and character development the author packs into this one eventful night. Be forewarned, the novel will break your heart, but it is one of the powerful, moving novels I have read in a while. The internal voices, so frail, so real, and so distinct from one character to the next are a tour-de-force of writing.

Keith Lee Morris is one of the best writers at work in the U.S. He's one my favorite writers and I find his writing almost addictive.
"The Dart League King" is a psychological novel revolving around a group of people in Lake Garnet, ID--mostly men who sell and ingest cocaine. They're small-town people who've known one another from one generation to the next their whole lives.
One of Morris' many fascinating and pleasurable achievements in this book is that despite the characters' serious limitations, they're immediately people you care about and enjoy. The dialogue is filled with common if vulgar terms that Morris uses almost rhythmically so that the emphatic words do in fact emphasize each character's speech. Further, the dialogue not only rings true and sounds natural but amazed me by being beautiful.
Among the group is one young single mother who has factored in the lives of, or merely attracted most of the men. Morris writes the novel in an intimate, interior third person and the one woman struck me as real and vivid as the men. (I notice when men write inside a woman's mind, and as a woman myself I judge what seems believable and what seems like a man's idea of how women are.)
Somewhere I saw "The Dart League King" described as a man's book: but this is one novel I would not limit like that.
Kelly is central to the plot and her fate is the one that's critical. She's not radically different from the male characters except that as a mother and female, many of her thoughts and actions involve caring for other people and putting them first. The men have no overriding need to care about anyone but themselves and by and large they don't.
The story occurs on the night of the local Dart League championship and throughout the competition the men engage in bashing heads, threatening each other with weapons, and drawing blood: One minute a man is drawing a gun on another only to champion his adversary and embrace him the next.
The young man, who by the end of the novel becomes the Dart League King, has a burgeoning cocaine habit he hasn't recognized yet. He's sloppy and not very intelligent but for all his faults portrays kindness, decency, and a lively good will that the woman ends up depending on. She seems smarter and at first, holds a certain fondness for the crowd's apparently most accomplished guy, the only one who's gone to college and earned a degree. But she's not terribly surprised to learn the dumb but decent Dart League King is honorable and trustworthy, while the college man--something she half-intuited only to discover the non-intuitive half seals her fate--lands her in grave danger.