The Leper [Hardcover]

Steve Thayer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2008

A veteran of World War I, John Severson becomes a school teacher in a tough, working-class St. Paul neighborhood where a high school diploma is a rarity. Severson has dreams, aspirations. But something had happened to him during the war, something awful. And it follows him home and changes every part of his life. John Severson becomes a leper. Instantly he is torn from his dreams, disconnected from his beautiful plan, ripped from the woman he loves. But Severson is determined to reclaim what he lost, to overcome the horror that is leprosy, to dream again.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Who wants to read a novel about a leper? Anyone who wants to be enlightened, educated and entertained by bestseller Thayer's (The Weatherman) unusual but awe-inspiring hero. After stumbling on a French-German leper village while serving as a marine captain during WWI, John Severson takes a healthy little girl to safety while his near-mutinous men are ordered to return to the front. After an inquiry ends favorably, Severson returns home to St. Paul, Minn., where he becomes a high school math teacher and is secretly engaged to his favorite student. His happiness shatters after a routine medical check identifies him as a leper. In the wake of the Spanish flu epidemic, this means forced quarantine at Louisiana's Witch Tree leprosarium, which Thayer describes in disturbing and sometimes lurid detail. After escaping from Witch Tree, Severson winds up as the sheriff of Hawaii's Molokai leper colony, a relentless crusader for Hansen's disease sufferers, whose rights as U.S. citizens were too long compromised by fear. This book deserves a wide readership. (Sept.)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* One of the characters in this novel asks who’d want to read a book about a leper. If it’s this book, the answer is almost anyone. This is quite simply a wonderful novel, one that delivers on the promise Thayer displayed in his previous fiction (Weather Man, 1995, and Silent Snow, 1999). Its story is simple: the life of soldier turned schoolteacher John Eric Severson, from World War I to the mid-1970s. But this is no typical biographical novel, following the traditional arc of a life, because Severson, soon after his return to the U.S. from the war, is diagnosed with leprosy and sent to a Louisiana leper colony. He never sees his home, his family, or the woman he loves again. This could have been a relentlessly depressing novel—think Count of Monte Cristo without the escape—but Thayer, with consummate grace and sheer storytelling ability, makes it an uplifting, emotionally exuberant story of a man who, faced with insurmountable odds, discovers a sense of self that proves impervious to external discomfort. The book is filled with engaging, memorable supporting players, and Severson himself is such a vividly drawn character that readers may have to remind themselves that he is a fictional character. If a movie had been made from this novel, say, 60 years ago, Gary Cooper would have been the perfect actor to play Severson, a man whose grace and intelligence in the face of tragic adversity is downright inspiring. --David Pitt

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: North Star Press of St. Cloud, Inc.; 1 edition (June 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0878392661
• ISBN-13: 978-0878392667
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #768,449 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars rich historic narrative, September 7, 2008

By 

Julie Kramer (Minnesota) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Leper (Hardcover)

This might be Steve Thayer's best historical suspense novel. Readers watch as protagonist John Severson evolves from military officer to schoolteacher to leper. The startling diagnosis and label ruin his promising life in Minnesota, and he lives the next sixty years in secluded colonies in Louisiana and Hawaii. This is the most epic and original of Thayer's work. Much about leprosy is misunderstood and this book attempts to educate as well as entertain. Fans of the author will delight in cameos by characters in his previous bestselling novels.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating idea, poorly executed, September 9, 2009

By 

Karen Franklin "Forensic Psychologist" (El Cerrito, CA, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Leper (Hardcover)

Few novels have been written from the perspective of a leper, so this historical novel spanning from World War I to the 1990s promised to be an interesting read. Indeed, The Leper starts off with a bang, with a bedraggled group of lost Marines stumbling upon a mysterious leper colony hidden deep in a remote forest in Europe.

Time quickly passes. Our hero, a tall and handsome young Swedish-American, returns from the war and becomes a high school math teacher in Minnesota before contracting leprosy from his wartime exposure. He is captured (and I'm not spoiling the plot here, as all this becomes apparent early on) and sent first to a hellish leprosy camp in Louisiana and, ultimately, to the larger colony on Molokai (Hawaii). Along the way, he falls in love, and makes friends and enemies.

So far, so good. The problem with The Leper is not with the plot outline, but with the execution. The characters are so wooden that it is hard to suspend disbelief. Even the larger-than-life hero never comes fully to life. Instead, we are treated to a parade of one-dimensional, cardboard characters, entering and exiting the hero's orb. The female love interests are especially stereotyped - the alluring student, the vixen Negro prostitute, the hula-dancing native Hawaiian. Most unbelievable of all are a series of phantom-like characters from the past whose sole purposes in life revolve around "the Swede."

Contributing to the difficulty in escaping into this novel is the poor quality of the narrative. Mr. Thayer started with a promising outline, along with quite a bit of historical information (much of it gleaned from The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Molokai, which I recommend as a nonfiction account). But, rather than integrate it all into a nuanced narrative, he merely talks at us for 400-odd pages.

Most jarring of all is the clichéd and error-filled writing itself. Breaking Stephen King's cardinal rule on the use of adverbs (see King's On Writing), the pages are strewn with excess adverbs, including the dread "literally" (as in, "he was literally covered with raw ulcers)." Almost every misspelling that a computer spell-checker will miss (e.g., ores-oars, lightening-lightning, breath-breathe, whose-who's, there-their) can be found in abundance, indicating a lack of competent human editing by North Star Press.

In the end, much as I started off wanting to love this book, the flaws are severe enough that I can only give it a half-hearted nod. If you know little about leprosy and want to learn more without reading nonfiction, and if you are not too picky about clean writing, you might enjoy it.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars not up to usual standard, March 19, 2009

By 

C. Harper (little rock ar) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Leper (Hardcover)

I was surprised to see all the positive reviews for this book. I have enjoyed Thayer's other books, found them very suspenseful. This one seemed to me like he might have written it first, and improved with the others. Also, I can't remember reading a book with so many proofreading errors, looked like he recorded it and had it typed by someone who couldn't spell: fair for fare, road for rode, mote for moat, passed for past, wrapped for rapped, your for you're - you get the idea. His other books are far superior.