Living Dead Girl [Paperback]

Tod Goldberg (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2003

After his estranged wife disappears, a husband returns to the remote lake house where their young daughter died, and he soon loses his grip on reality.
 
Paul Luden has been haunted by a memory he can't recall. Whatever happened to his marriage, to his two-year-old daughter, is too traumatic to remember, so his unconscious has chosen to block out key details. But when he receives a phone call from the small lake town where they'd lived, telling him that no one had seen or heard from his wife in ten days, he knows what he has to do.
 
He and his nineteen-year-old girlfriend drive from L.A. to Washington State where he's forced to confront his past. And as he pieces together his buried memories, Paul unravels mentally, falls into self-destructive trances and ultimately discovers the truth about his wife.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Goldberg's second novel (after 2000's Fake Liar Cheat) comes within a spit-and-a-holler of success but, alas, it's short on spit and overlong on holler. The tale could be glibly described as Hitchcockian, but it has more of the feel and texture of a European film one that takes its audience from obscurity to obfuscation without apology and closes with an abiding chill. Thankfully, unlike a European film, the author makes everything clear by the end. Paul Luden, a professor of anthropology, and his adoring wife, Molly, had a child they worshipped. They bought a cabin on Granite Lake in Washington state and were prepared to live a bucolic existence. But a serpent in their Eden first killed their daughter, then drove them to the brink of madness. Both feeling responsible for their daughter's death, they separated. Later, Paul is back on his feet and is dating a 19-year-old student, Ginny, who, like his estranged wife, loves him enough to make him crazy. When he receives a call from a friend that Molly has disappeared from their place at the lake, he returns to the cabin and to a blizzard of bad memories about the death of their child and the breakup of their marriage. The reader, like Paul, soon wonders if Paul has actually killed Molly in the midst of some kind of fugue fit. While this is engrossing and atmospheric stuff, it is too painfully drawn out. That said, Goldberg shows plenty of promise and may yet become a leading suspense writer. Agent, Jennie Dunham. (May 20)Miramax.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

When narrator Paul Luden travels to his isolated summer lake house with his 19-year-old girlfriend, he discovers that his estranged wife has apparently gone missing. Because Paul has a suspect history (his daughter died at the house under strange circumstances), he is arrested. Paul subsequently unravels mentally, his relationship breaks up, he falls into self-destructive trances, and he ultimately discovers the truth about his wife. The author of Fake Liar Cheat has produced an evocative read full of seductive prose, sharply focused characters, and a microcosmic world fraught with human sadness.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Soho Crime; Uitgawe & Revised edition (July 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1569473374
• ISBN-13: 978-1569473375
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 4.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,835,334 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Tod Goldberg is the author of several books of fiction, including the novels Living Dead Girl, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Fake Liar Cheat and the popular Burn Notice series, as well as two collections of short stories, Simplify and Other Resort Cities. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature from Bennington College and lives in La Quinta, CA where he directs the Low Residency MFA program in Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts at the University of California, Riverside's Palm Desert campus. His latest book, Where You Lived, is available exclusively as an ebook. For more information, visit todgoldberg.typepad.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Review, April 18, 2004

By 

kerrie (England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Living Dead Girl (Hardcover)

This book, the LA Times Book Prize Finalist, written by Tod Goldberg, is an emotional rollercoaster of a murder mystery, based on crumbling relationships, and centering on the main character's haunting past.

Paul Luden, a 32-year-old anthropologist, and his girlfriend, a 19-year-old student called Ginny, hear that Paul's ex-wife is missing, and travel to her home on a scenic lake, to try and piece together what happened to her. It becomes obvious during the novel that Molly, his ex-wife, was his only real love interest, and this has a harrowing effect of Paul when he tries to come to terms with his marriage break up, and the death of his 2-year-old daughter, Katrina. The path of Paul trying to decipher and rember his past is, sometimes, confusing, but articulately written.

At times, the way he underestimates Ginny becomes irritating, and Paul's character (namely his obsession with relating his job to life) does take away the beauty of the storyline. The way Paul is tied to his wife is heartbreaking, making this book one you just can't put down.

This is Holden Caulfield, if he were in a muder mystery.

8/10

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars hey Tod give us a book about "how to" write because you can!, May 19, 2002

By 

K. Cade (St Petersburg, FL) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Living Dead Girl (Hardcover)

I read this book on a sunny Saturday at the beach. I am sunburned now because I couldnt stop reading long enough to walk to my car before I finished.

There are some very haunting images floating through my mind and yet the biggest thing I have taken away with me from Living Dead Girl is love. The images and emotions that are portrayed in this book are amazingly beautiful sometimes in the most morbid of ways. We want what we touch for a moment to last for a lifetime and yet that moment that we know love is a reality is a moment that becomes a lifetime. I have always believed that there is one person in the world that each of us is meant to love. And while many never find that person and settle for the person that finds them.it is so apparent in this book that Ginny loves Paul faults and all and yet for him that one person is Molly, a paradox that plays out throughout the entire book.

The powerful forces that love can cause and create are amazing. And this novel is nothing like a mystery (like Ive read all over the internet that it is..society needs to pigeonhole every damn thing until they make a square peg fit a round hole!!!) unless you consider the mystery of that which is love. And of course the disappearance of Molly is an ongoing source of questioning.

There were passages of this book that simply brought tears to my eyes. Mostly during Pauls explanations of the good times that he and Molly shared.

I know that I will read this book again because there was one story happening in the forefront and another story happening in the background. I think it was amazing how the author manages to make the characters so real that they become people that you care about. Mr. Goldberg managed to make the character of Katrina be someone that I the reader felt myself mourning. The notion that had she just not gotten ill, that somehow Paul and Molly and Katrina would have gone on happily. I suppose thats not the stuff of good novels though. The trite and happy endings usually follow up a book that totally [stinks]. I think what makes a good novel is one that makes you want to crawl into the book with a giant eraser and say NO NOmr. Writer man.we will just not have this.. as we erase with fury and will and an evil grin. But we cant and so were drug through mental hell like a bloody body behind a car. We are already in motion but its causing one hell of a brush burn during the ride.

These characters will be in my head for a long time to come.

Its a fast paced ride, youll never find yourself wondering why you chucked out cash to be this entertained. And you wont soon forget it.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars LA Times Book Prize Finalist, May 7, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Living Dead Girl (Hardcover)

A stunning example of what happens when a writer of literary fiction pulls parts of several genres into one compelling piece. Living Dead Girl is such a poetic and heartbreaking book -- equal parts mystery novel, character piece, literary novel and unreliable narration exercise -- and Goldberg was well deserving of his recent nomination for the LA Times Book Prize. Unlike his previous book, Fake Liar Cheat, which was a funny noirish romp through LA aimed at the MTV generation, Living Dead Girl is a serious look into the human condition and what happens when love dies. This is one of those books that should have been a bestseller -- maybe it will be in paperback.