During the six months following the fiery Fourth of July deaths of his parents in a car wreck, Calvin Turtle, 20-year-old heir to a Louisville playing card company, attempts to manage the family business and his father's vast hunting preserve in Gaheena, Arkansas, all the while being force to fight charges that he killed his parents. Calvin's struggle to comprehend and master a world of good, evil and indifference culminates in a snaky quagmire where he battles a man named Karl who epitomizes raw, guiltless power. In a compelling 1970's tale that contrasts normalcy, whatever that may be, against the paradoxes in nature and humanity, THE KING OF GAHEENA reflects the very heart of a troubled American generation. From the opening deal to the final play of the cards, Calvin's obsessive odyssey is shot through with stout doses of confrontation and loss, love and lust, violence and wonder, longing and learning, rediscovery and redemption. www.MotesBooks.com
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SQUIRE BABCOCK has taken a long and fascinating path to becoming a novelist. He grew up in an abusive Louisville home and was eventually arrested and jailed for possession of heroin. In the ensuing years he worked as a ballroom dance instructor, farm hand, weigh-man in a cotton gin, hunting guide, pool table repair mechanic, small business owner, carpenter, free-lance journalist and blues drummer. At the age of 30 he sold his Nashville pool table business and registered as a freshman English major at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst. After graduating with his B.A., he taught English at a Massachusetts boarding school for three years before returning to UMass for his MFA. He is currently Associate Professor of English at Murray State University, where he has taught English and creative writing for 18 years and directed the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing. When he is not writing or teaching, he raises his daughter, Hannah, and gardens and water-skis and hikes and rides his Harley in the beautiful lakes region of western Kentucky.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Potent tale of guilt, shame, class, and violence,
By
This review is from: The King of Gaheena (Paperback)
That our heaviest burdens are invisible is no revelation--but this doesn't make those burdens any less agonizing. Squire Babcock's powerful and insightful THE KING OF GAHEENA explores the particular torments of Calvin Turtle, whom we first encounter at home in Louisville on Christmas Eve, 1957, when he finds his younger sister electrocuted on the living room floor following a freak accident involving the Christmas tree lights and a spilled drink left by the kids' parents. Calvin, an introspective and emotionally fragile boy, subsequently becomes the recipient of his mother and father's fury and despair--expressed by his father with emasculating disdain and welt-producing physical violence, and by his mother with unconscionable, weirdly tender sexual abuse. Calvin escapes into a particular form of solitaire called Klondike, and in strings of nonsensical rhyme (based on card suits) that he recites aloud when frightened. Flash-forward to 1972: Calvin is by now 20 years old, and when his parents die in a fiery car crash that is partly Calvin's (possibly unintentional) doing, he inherits the Louisville-based family business, the Turtle Playing Card Co. He also takes control of "the hunt club," a swampy duck-hunters' paradise in Gaheena, Arkansas, that has been enjoyed for decades by friends of Calvin's father, and overseen by a leathery bully named Karl Buntingstrife. Calvin has lived inside his own bruised heart for so long that he's simply overwhelmed by his new responsibilities. Babcock reveals a shrewd understanding of high-stakes commerce and class struggle when Calvin's attempt to run the card factory dissolves into an ugly legal tussle with the company's predatory board, labor strife that's unpleasantly tinged with racism, and internal sabotage on the factory floor. All of this is good, involving stuff, but Babcock really shines when he takes us from hypocritically genteel Louisville to Gaheena, a humid sort of hell where Calvin becomes reacquainted with Karl and immediately rubs the guy the wrong way. Calvin also explores passionate lust with a musky bayou goddess named Money, and finally finds his life in jeopardy because he's trampled other people's sense of entitlement. With the exception of Calvin's on-again, off-again girlfriend, Penny, who seems a convenient device rather than a real person, characters are incisively drawn. Calvin, alternately miserable and heroic, is a particularly impressive creation. With a powerful sense of place (you'll feel every drop of sweat and every remorseless mosquito), simmering brew of latent violence, and (most pointedly, perhaps) Calvin's obsession with the surprising woman called Money, THE KING OF GAHEENA evokes another superior storyteller, John D. MacDonald. The book's emotional bite, grounded so powerfully in the link between brother and long-lost sister, may remind you of Joyce Carol Oates. And in its brisk pace, eye for cultural detail, and beautifully colloquial narrative and dialogue, the novel stands favorably with the work of yet another important writer, Stewart O'Nan. THE KING OF GAHEENA is an honest book that, while emotionally brutal, traffics neither in nihilism nor sentimentality. I read it in a single sitting. I was glued, and you will be as well.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Truly Wonderful Book,
By Nashville Reader (Nashville, TN USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The King of Gaheena (Paperback)
What a fine book this is. Well-written, eloquent, funny and insightful. I feel so fortunate to have found it. Highly recommended.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Parricide,
This review is from: The King of Gaheena (Paperback)
Normally we wouldn't sympathize with characters accused of killing their parents, but Calvin Turtle comes along and we find ourselves doing just that. Despite all his flaws and shortcomings, his actions and subsequent denial seem not only understandable but somehow excusable in Squire Babcock's impressive first novel, King of Gaheena.We first meet five-year-old Calvin on Christmas Eve, 1957, when he discovers the body of his sister, her electrocution an accidental consequence of their drinking parents' fight. Calvin inwardly blames his parents for her death and over the years he deals (so to speak) with his loss and anger through the solitaire game, Klondike. He plays this almost impossible game with the conviction that if he ever wins, his wish will be granted. When he is ten years old he finally beats Klondike not once, but twice. With childlike faith, Calvin waits for his sister's return. Jewel, of course, doesn't appear and we learn that Calvin's family is not only dysfunctional but physically and sexually abusive. The aftermath of that night extends ten years, when Calvin is blamed in the fiery death of his parents. The novel is partly set in Louisville, Kentucky during the 1970's. Calvin is left after his parents' deaths to manage the family playing card company. With the trial looming, he finds himself in the middle of managing a business struggling with lay-offs, racial tensions, strikes and sabotage. Wanting to prove himself a worthy heir apparent, he is further frustrated when he learns he will not have full control of the company until he turns 21. Until that time he must outmaneuver the board made up of his father's hunt club buddies to be able to make his own business decisions. The setting shifts between the factories and country clubs of Louisville to his father's hunting preserve in Gaheena, Arkansas, "a vast, snaky, dead-timber swamp so rich and teeming with life that you could easily mistake it for the Primal Soup." The standing king of Gaheena, Karl Buntingstrife, is as formidable as the surroundings. Calvin appears to be no match for the snake-wrangling, gun-toting caretaker of the preserve or his sultry mistress, Money. In the end, Calvin's naïveté is his saving grace. Had he understood the length that Karl would go to protect the preserve, he might have chosen a less perilous path. Karl is ruthless, but his intention to protect what he loves is honorable compared to the hunt club's hypocritical intentions, although his means are not. We watch as Calvin frequently overestimates himself and his abilities. His brashness and cockiness rub others the wrong way, but as readers we are allowed to see past his outer facade. In his more introspective moments and when his is with people he knows and trusts, we like him and suspect that if he somehow manages to make it to adulthood, he'll emerge as a good man, perhaps even a heroic one. He could just as easily succumb to the same societal traps as his parents, doomed to repeat the past. And by the end of the book, we don't know what the future holds for Calvin. Unlike the son in Guy de Maupassant's short story, who freely admits he killed his parents, Calvin struggles. Outwardly he declares his innocence, but inwardly he battles through issues of denial, self-righteousness and guilt. Short chapters, present tense, shifting voice and steady doses of suspense, make this a book you don't want to put down. Full of humor, richly textured characters and settings, The King of Gaheena, is hopefully the first of many novels we will enjoy from Squire Babcock.
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