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Rampage [Hardcover]

Susan Taylor Chehak (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)


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Book Description

August 17, 1998
Four critically acclaimed novels . . .
A master of the Midwestern gothic . . .
If you haven't discovered Susan Taylor Chehak:

Welcome to Rampage.

Once again, Chehak has mined her Midwestern roots and produced a highly charged novel where the questions of the present are inextricably bound up with the secrets of the past. In this novel, Chehak sets her story in a small town called Rampage, and as its name implies, it is a place where much violence converges on those whose lives are bound up in its dark history.

Madlen Cramer has come back home with her two young children to be reunited with her childhood friend Rafe, the sexy drifter who has abducted a four-year-old girl from an abusive foster family, leaving the parents for dead. During this hot Iowa summer, the past will refuse to stay past as painful truths begin to emerge: about Rafe's own foster family; about Madlen's marriage, whose bonds had begun to unravel in the months before her husband's tragic accident; and about her beautiful self-absorbed mother, whose passions bring about the devastating entanglement of two families in an embrace that cannot be undone until Rafe has gone on the rampage that will destroy everything in sight and leave readers breathless.

A master of the Midwestern gothic, Susan Taylor Chehak is that rare writer who brings the closely observed detail to a level of storytelling that has earned her both an Edgar nomination and the praise of critics nationwide. Rampage is for people who understand, on every level, that you really can't go home again.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An adolescent girl sneaks out of her house at night, walks down a winding path between trees to a wide, swollen river where she goes wading in the dark with two boys. That girl grows up into a woman named Madlen. At the start of the novel she has just lost her husband in a car accident and is taking her daughter and son from California back to the setting of her adolescence in Rampage, Iowa.

The teenaged daughter Claire, who is now the age Madlen was when she used to slip out and go down to the river, has "lost track of herself." Fatherless, suddenly yanked from her familiar suburban California environment to this strange, slow town in Iowa, Claire finds herself adrift, vaguely searching for something. A series of portents gather danger about her: an old woman dies in the mud while walking confused in a rainstorm; a murderer kidnaps (or rescues?) a small child and comes back home to Rampage to hide; Madlen's father's young wife is pregnant but has a leaky womb; and Madlen is going slightly mad as she revisits in her mind the tragic events surrounding her mother's death. Claire unconsciously begins to repeat Madlen's old patterns, including wading at night in the river.

This elegant, chilling novel moves slowly--developing several characters with a sure, steady hand--and yet the mysterious allure of an unseen element that one character calls "some place dark and unspeakable" keeps you turning the pages, wondering how the gathering tension will eventually resolve. The climax is a sudden, sharp shock, bringing all the threads together in a single violent sequence.

Susan Taylor Chehak has crafted a powerful tale of non-supernatural horror that will reward those who are patient enough to fall under its spell. Long after you've finished reading it, Rampage will linger in your mind. --Fiona Webster

From Publishers Weekly

Named, like Chehak's 1990 Harmony, for the small Midwestern town of its setting, this coolly precise, rather muted gothic thriller opens in Oregon, when Rafe Ramsey steals four-year-old Jolie, whom he claims is his daughter, away from her abusive foster parents, whom he kills before fleeing for California. Meanwhile, the husband of Rafe's childhood playmate Madlen Cramer dies in L.A. in a mysterious car wreck. Unbeknownst to her, Rafe follows grieving Madlen and her two children back to her father's house in Rampage, Iowa, where she, Rafe and her dead husband, Haven, grew up. A claustrophobic town, sandwiched between an insane asylum and a prison, tossed by deadly, not-quite-natural thunderstorms, Rampage holds secrets that are stirred up by Madlen's and Rafe's separate arrivals. Chehak is at her best describing memories, by turns idyllic and disturbing, of the lost childhood that Madlen, Rafe and Haven shared, and of their nascent understanding of the dark, grownup doings around them. Although Rafe is an intriguing villain whose violence seems to spring from thwarted attempts at love, the book's contrived climax?when Madlen must decide whether to take him as a lover or else force herself to look into his sinister past?is less satisfying than the slow buildup and expert atmospherics for which Chehak (Smithereens) is already well known. (Aug.) FYI: Chehak and her husband recently opened a bookstore/cafe called Inxspots in Keystone, Colo.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 321 pages
  • Publisher: Doubleday; 1st edition (August 17, 1998)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0385484526
  • ISBN-13: 978-0385484527
  • Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,417,432 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Susan Taylor Chehak is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop and the author of five novels, including Smithereens (a Hammett Award nominee), The Truth About Annie D. (an Edgar Award nominee and New York Times Notable Book), and Harmony (a Literary Guild Editor's Choice), as well as a book of nonfiction, Don Quixote Meets the Mob: The Craft of Fiction and the Art of Life. Her short stories have appeared in Word Riot, Coe Review, Guernica Magazine, L.A. Under The Influence, Sisters in Crime 5, and The Chariton Review. She teaches fiction writing in the low residency MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles, as well as in The UCLA Extension Writers' Program and the Summer Writing Festival at the University of Iowa. Susan grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, spends as much time as possible in Colorado, and at present divides her time between Los Angeles and Toronto.

 

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A writer's writer at her finest, August 4, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: Rampage (Hardcover)
RAMPAGE captures, in eloquently discriptive language, the darkside of humanity, blistered by a shock of pure white light that illuminates the truths we all hide within our souls. A revelation of a book! Chehak will be around for a long, long time mustering up images so emotionally charged that they will be placed high on the shelf of literary masters.
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