Customer Reviews

Lost Souls

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This was my first reading of a work by Michael Collins, who I met at an informal book signing in Dowagiac, MI. He has somewhat adopted this small town, approximately 25 miles north of Notre Dame University where he had a athletic scholarship to run on their cross county team and graduated from their Creative Writing School. He is truly representative of the "fighting Irish" as he was born and raised in Limerick, Ireland.

Lost Souls is a murder who-done-it that will keep you turning the pages to find out the next twist, which to me, is one important test of a mystery novel along with not too much side-show but enough to know where you are and who the people in story are. This is the book to take on your next trip or maybe tonight, if you want to read something you can't put down...and this is even the time of year to tie-in with the story, Halloween!

Collins use of a small Midwestern town, maybe not unlike Dowagiac, provides a comfortable feel for plain surroundings and easy to identify characters. There is a level of realism in the way the author develops the characters which reminded me of folks I've met along the way.

He takes us on a journey, begun with the murder of a child dressed for tick or treat but it is only the first of many murders. It is told to us by Lawrence the local cop, who himself is going through many life crisis. He seems to know what he should do but at each fork in the road he takes the easy path, yet his life continues to spin out of control. We meet some people who are suspects not just to the murders but doing their best to cover up the facts. They like Lawrence have their own demons and Michael gently inserts many clues to help or not, yet urges us on to the next chapter to find out more.

This is not an Irish author writing a small town Midwestern mystery but an author who knows about story telling. In the best tradition of Irish writers he is able to tell us a story without the pain and suffering from the old sod about his adopted land. There is something special in those Irish genes for spinning a great yarn!

I am sure we will be reading much from this very talented writer. Lost Souls is well worth your reading and I look forward to his next book

Bill Higgins

Higgins721@aol.com

I think the time I spent reading this book might better have been spent in a coma.

Don't get me wrong. Sure, the book is noir fiction; but I enjoy good dark fiction as much as anyone. If you want a good example of the genre, read any of Ross McDonald's mysteries or the much under-rated Saratoga series by Stephen Dobyns.

And it's not that the anti-hero is an alcoholic. As long as he can drop into an AA program and tack on some self-awareness, he's got my blessing. Try reading some of Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder novels; or James Lee Burke's Robicheaux series for a taste of that.

And it's not that the ending is inconclusive. I was totally satisfied by Thomas H. Cook's brilliant novel, "The Interrogation".

What it is about this book is that nothing is redemptive, nothing lifts the book up in any way. The narrator is an unremorseful alcoholic who entertains the conceit that he is a refugee, thereby demeaning virtually every refugee on the planet; the narrator is a loser. Very literally: he has lost his wife, his son. In the course of the book, through sheer obstinate stupidity, he loses his dog, his future, his credibility, his integrity, and whatever few remaining IQ points he had at the beginning of the novel.

The lose ends at the novel's end are painful: a girl has been murdered, it seems ritualistically, but we never know who committed the murder, only who has taken the blame. A woman is missing -- we are told by one character that she is safe but have no evidence of this, and in fact clues seems to imply the opposite. The narrator who has not made one correct deduction through the entire course of the novel expects us to trust his belief that he has been given reliable information by a character whose very choices makes her an unlikely candidate for reliable revelations.

I know that this book has been lauded by some. It has a bleakness that might be mistaken for truth or clarity of vision; but here the bleakness is a cheap, contrived bleakness, the bleakness that comes from the eyes of the beholder, the unreliable narrator of this book, the alcoholic who must find the flaw, even if none exists, in every person he meets, especially if anything in their life transcends the facts of his own existence. Yeah, yeah, yeah: I know that small towns can be insular and smothering, that in real life people are often mean-minded and blind to truth, that entire communities can be that way. Duh! Did Collins think he was on to something the rest of us was missing? Did he see some underlying truth of the human condition we never knew was there? If so, he certainly failed to convey it.

If you want to read about all-pervading loss of hope, despair that tears at the soul, and yet sense a ribbon of humanity beneath it, then find the novels of Graham Greene, all of them, and start reading.

As for this novel, if you have a bird cage ...

In a seamless story of actual loss (the death of a child), and a more ethereal emotional loss that permeates this sad, but honest, novel, author Michael Collins, continues to mine a slice of the American psyche we may not want to stare into. Lost Souls is David Lynch's Blue Velvet meets Mystic River, a surreal realism that takes readers into the dark psyche of a town.

Bleakness permeates this novel, a cop who has pulled a gun on his wife, divorced and unable to pay child support, a cop who is pulled into a cover up of a supposed hit and run on Halloween night in a small mid-west town. The inevitable trajetory of the novel is not hidden, but what Collins does is take us deep into the sense of despair and moral crisis facing so many people in economic ruination. There are trenchant passages of brilliant insight within this novel, and amidst a surreal story where the bodies pile up, Collins pulls off an uncanny, and amazing masterpiece of literary suspense.

I hate to go against the grain of all the other reviews on this page written by much more articulate readers than me. Yeah, this guy can write like only a few other authors I've read. Beautiful prose. But about half way through this book, I started hoping that the main character would either go ahead and suicide or get to an AA meeting. I mean, the despair was just relentless. And being a refugee from small town America myself, I can certainly recognize a few of the characters, but dam! every citizen in this town is a cretin. It's like that photographer, Diane Arbus or whoever, and how she was able to photograph probably a fairly normal person and bring out something sort of funky and corrupt in them. I will probably read more by Michael Collins, if just for the writing, but I'll approach the book with a bit more distance.

The story begins with the discovery of the body of a little girl who appears to have been killed in a hit-and-run, through the eyes of the policeman who has found the body and is meant to investigate the case, while getting sucked deeper and deeper into power games.

As the characters' lives intertwine in an ever-growing circle and the plot twists and turns, I was glad for the short chapters that make it the perfect read on a commute!

On the downside, it seems to round up in a bit of a rush, leaving a few questions unanswered, but still a good read.

The almost gothic aura of Lost Souls comes early in the image of a dead child dressed in an angel's costume discovered dead in a pile of leaves by the side of the road on Halloween. The opening chapter sets the tone for Lost Souls, a ruminative, down and out, divorced cop who muses on his dead end life before he discovers the body.

Collins sets up the main cop with a moral choice. The cop is asked by the mayor and chief of police to participate in a cover up of the child's death, and in exchange the cop (Lawrence) will get the police chief's job when the chief retires. The cop agrees, though reluctantly, and what ensues is a twisted plot of deceit and series of murders spawned from the original death of the small child.

Chillingly real, the high school scenes are reminiscent of so many murders at our high schools over the years. The cop in his dead pan first person voice gives a brutally honest account of the souls of all the characters within the novel. He is neither complimentary nor degrading in his opinions, rather the chilling details of the lives lived in this Lost Town are all too real.

In our reading group we felt Lost Souls was a great murder mystery, a genunine page turner packed with a range of great characters, and though we as readers go through the valley of hell through much of the novel, it does end with a believable, redemptive quality which we though was in keeping with the novel. The main character, though flawed, is essentially good and after all the murders that take place in Lost Souls, it is to the author's credit that he could offer a different vision toward the end of the novel.

Lost Souls is one of our picks for the year so far.

Not far into Lost Souls set in a small Midwest town, I got a feeling I was within the world of John Mellencamp, a world of little pink houses and small lives. If a Mellencamp song could become a ballad, then Lost Souls is that ballad, a fable-like story of the death of a small child on Halloween that spawns a tragic tale of loss and death.

Lost Souls is one of the most beautiful, and yet tragic novels I've read in ages. Told through the eyes of a first person narrator, Lawrence, the cop who uncovers the dead child amidst a pile of leaves in an angel's costume, we get a narrative that flits between a shimmer of literary genius and the cold, stark reality of the lives lived within the novel. Only Carver and Richard Ford have handled the subtleties of lower class life with such profound dignity and compassion. The lives in this book are rendered with a tragic pathos.

The novel's structure is so in keeping with the narrative voice, a twice told tale, a cop remembering, reliving a nightmare period in his and the town's life. The sense of retelling, the inevitable tragic outcome gives the book its weight and density. Brilliantly advanced through a sequential telling of events, the narrator brings the mystery to focus through his eyes and fears. We feel the mounting tension and drama. The shortness of the chapters is a compelling stylistic device that keeps this story racing toward an ending that cannot be predicted, but illuminates the power of the author. In a slight of hand, I felt this was not just a murder story, but something deeper. It's elegiac in its compassion but also in its realism, and from my California beach property I was transported for a few days into the far flung denizens of the plains who also call themselves Americans.

After reading the book, its undertow of a book is so strong I went down for a swim, to cleanse myself of the novel. I mean that in a good way. I remember surfacing and looking back at my house and feeling glad my ancestors had moved West with their dreams of gold and the ocean.

If a title can sum up a book, Lost Souls captures this brilliant, heartbreaking tale of desperation in small town America. The first chapter ends with an account of a child's death so haunting it made me cry.

Working with a conceit of costumes and masks, a dead child amidst a pile of leaves, to a boy in a ET mask, to a quarterback in a helmet, to hints at a KKK past of dark secrets, this book flits between a cold realism and gothic details as a cop central to the coverup of the little girl's death becomes embroiled in a web of political and emotional turmoil.

Part psychological, part sociological portrait, Lost Souls has the pace of a thriller, but the resonance of a deeper story, and through the latter part, in sequence of a breast cancer examination at the mall, to a trip through an immigrant ghetto on the outskirts of Chicago, the novel takes on an elevated sense of power and insight, marking Collins as one of a few writers of true social conscience.

`Lost Souls' is the perfect example of how the most beautiful and haunting prose can be created within the crime fiction genre. This book goes beyond genre type casting. It's a story about a small town in the Mid-West's slow disintegration and the cost it's willing to pay for a last gasp of air before it goes under.

Just past midnight on a Halloween night in 1984. A local cop, Lawrence, feeds his dog Max and himself after a long day. Both Max and Lawrence have a mean case of separation anxiety two years after Lawrence's divorce. They both lead a mostly sedated day to day existence and a long weekend at a cabin in the woods may by just what they need.

But, a call arrives that destroys this apathetic existence and reveals a small fissure in their small town existence.

A three-year-old girl is missing. After putting her daughter to bed at nine o'clock, Lisa Kendell passes out on her living room couch. A cold draft awakens her to her open front door and her missing child.

Max sniffs out a pile of leaves on the street in front of the mother's house. Pushing the leaves aside, Lawrence find the broken wings of an angel costume. The little girl had been dead for hours. Stepping back, Lawrence could see the zig zagging tire tracks that lead to the small pile of leaves. It's obvious to him the child is the victim of a hit and run.

A witness him leads him to a trace on a pick-up scene tearing away from the crime scene. It belongs to the town's star quarterback, Kyle Johnson. The town has pinned all its ragged hopes on the eighteen year-olds shoulders in the coming state play-offs. The mayor and the chief of police let Lawrence know, in no uncertain terms, that it would be better for everyone if the investigation led away from Kyle.

With the mayor's bargaining chip of a past transgression to hang over Lawrence's head and the hollow promise of a better future, Lawrence feels he has no choice to comply. When he goes to the boy's house, he disregards all evidence pointing to Kyle. He even grants forgiveness and penance after a hasty confession from the boy.

It is Lawrence's clinging to the carrot the mayor's hold just out of his reach that begins the slow, insipid whirlpool that pulls all the players in. There are too many people, with too much to hide from themselves and others, to keep everything from imploding. Not wanting to see what is happening to them, everyone turns from the truth. A truth that hides in plain sight. A truth that could hurt, and yet save the lives that are left.

Only when Lawrence has emerged from the undertow for the last time, does he grasp what has really happened and that all along he had the power to do something about it.

At times `Lost Souls' was painful to read and yet reading it was compulsory. Collins has a way of writing that is so fine and so subtle that you don't notice the silken threads of plot wrapping around you tighter and tighter. A vivid and powerful first person narrative instantly involves the reader in Lawrence's plight. And all the reader can do is read on as Lawrence stumbles in the dark, just out of reach of safety.

Collins has established his sharp, storytelling ability with `The Keepers of Truth' and `The Resurrectionists'. His characters are like wolves that bite their own paws off to free themselves from self-made steel traps. What compels the reader to keep turning the pages is the sense of `there but for the grace of God go I.' And the sense that this little town, and all of it's player's, are waiting just beyond the county line to act out their denouement.

This was a book that was full of suspence and great character development. It was fascinating to see to what lengths the people in the town would go to cover up a child's murder just so their football team could win a title. I completely enjoyed Michael Collin's book Lost Souls from cover to cover. I could not put it down.