Customer Reviews

Safe in Heaven Dead

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excellent book. The characters and their interaction with each other is what kept me reading. Shifting in point of view from the first-person perspective of a grad student/call girl in ny to the close-third pov of the main character, Ligon nails the voice of each of his characters. The dialogue is tight, the prose clean, and what really perked up my ears is the slight change in pov between his main character in his domestic life and in his life on the run. The pace of the book is quick, but the attention to subtle human adaptation is not lost in the speed of the story. Recommended.

"Robert Elgin died on the street, knocked down and run over by a Second Avenue bus while pursuing a woman he thought he could not live without."

How's that for an opening line grabber? With these arresting words debut novelist Samuel Ligon hooks readers who find themselves eagerly turning pages to discover just what brought Elgin to such an abrupt, untimely end. Tracking the answer to this question is pure pleasure as Mr. Ligon reveals his story in authoritative, gripping prose.

We learn that Elgin was once living the good life, the very good life in Michigan. He was happily married to Laura, and the father of two young children, Carrie, 5, and Tommy, 2. He worked in county labor, a negotiator. It was on the job that he quickly discovered just how seamy political corruption can be. His boss developed an acute case of political aspirations, and told Elgin to broker an under the counter deal that would fatten the gubernatorial wannabe's campaign chest.

Soon after that another shock: Elgin learns that Carrie has been sexually abused by a 12-year-old neighbor boy. Before long he and Laura are up to their necks in the miasma of a justice system that seemed to offer no justice or safety for Carrie. Laura was pleased with the counseling the girl received, and found solace in her church. Elgin, on the other hand, bolted. He stole the dirty money and went to New York where he assumed another identity.

Cash, he discovered, bought more than new clothes and a hotel room; it bought a false Social Security card and driver's license - it bought a whole new life. It also bought utter loneliness. Elgin realized "...there was not one person in the whole world, the whole universe, who he could talk to, or who knew who he was now - William Oliver, with no past, no context, no human encumbrance. It was as if he were dead..."

Carla, a doctoral student at Columbia University who moonlights as a paid escort, revived him. She, too, wanted to put a great deal behind her. They teamed up, and with just under half a million dollars began a luxury filled trek across the country.

But, where will they wind up and why?

"Safe In Heaven Dead" is an accomplished first novel. Hopefully, it is also promise of what is yet to come from this extraordinary author.

- Gail Cooke

This is an entertaining novel that's wise in its knowledge of official corruption, of rationalizations made by people to make right and moral their selfish choices. The story achieves an unusual thing: it keeps the suspense of a mystery while making children central players in this very adult drama. With each changed point of view, the literary voice re-grabs and holds you, not letting you go. The guy can write!

A great debut novel. The writing style is very straight forward, the characters are interesting, the situations are compelling. I was impressed by the author's ability to articulate complicated feelings in his characters. The book jacket makes it sound like it's going to be a pretty crazy ride, when in fact it's more about everyday people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances and choose one out of many ways to deal with the problems they are facing. While you may not personally choose to deal with your problems the way these characters did, the writing is so well done that you can see how someone would choose that path. Overall, a fast read and great book. I'm looking forward to Mr. Ligon's next novel!

Since the age of seven, Robert Elgin has fallen back on his church beliefs that faith can bring you anything if you just believe hard enough, and he has always wanted to be able to turn himself invisible. He felt like the minister had tricked him when he experimented with the invisible thing and it didn't work. He wrote it off as God "didn't exist when I didn't turn invisible." To him, it seemed like a cruel hoax. After hearing some stories about drugs and the devil, he opted for the dark side.

The epigraph at the beginning of this story is from a book by Jack Kerouac with the same title: "I wish I was free...and safe in heaven dead." As most humans do, he grew up, still feeling hopeless as a married man with two children, Carrie and Tommy. Life gets progressively bad for them when the wife, Laura, goes berserk, and so he decides he's had enough of her obsession with grief counselors. "She'd be too busy suffering, on the phone with her therapist, with Carrie's therapist, with a member of her support group."

After being involved in dirty dealing in the upcoming Governor's race, Robert abscounded with a large fund of slush money from the corrupt politics -- to fulfill his dream of becoming invisible and free from family troubles and a job where he feels completely irrelevant. In September, he runs away from Pontiac, Michigan, with a red and white duffel bag full of the stolen money. To cover his tracks, he first flew to Miami, Barbados, back to Memphis where he took the train to New York City. Since he'd never been there and no one there knew him, he could try the invisible thing as an adult and blend in.

Not used to having such a surplus of ready money, he became a big spender, used the alias William Oliver on his fake ID, and became the invisible man. It wasn't what he had expected; "there was not one person in the whole world, in the whole universe, who he could talk to, or who knew who he was now...with no past, no context, no human encumbrance. It was if he were dead...." After he gets involved with a Columbia grad student, Carla (real name Stacey), both leading 'double lives,' they set out on a trip across America. They travel around, first to Ohio, and St. Louis, Missouri, they are two lost souls searching for the other life they used to have. His is a double life as he suffers through that adult rite of passage called change-of-life. They stay in good hotels in Kansas City, where they buy and wear cowboy clothes, on to Denver and Salt Lake City, where they saw the statue of Brigham Young and the Mormon Tabernacle. From there, they drove to Las Vegas and as far as San Francisco. It's as if they were on a random odyssey when they travel back to Chicago, where they walked through the galleries of the Art Institute and down Michigan Avenue, both of which my son provided the opportunity to do -- after my stroke.

Along the way, they actually fall in love, but they part in Kalamazoo, where they went separate ways; she to her parents' to check on her ill mother in Flint, Michigan, he back to his old life to check on his kids. Five days before Christmas, he wandered through a Mall "jammed with Christmas shoppers" where he bought gifts for them, a china doll for Carrie and a wooden train set for Tommy. Jack Neely wrote about his choice of "good toys", a wooden helicopter he bought for his son. They are both products of the Sixties. Instead of taking the presents to them, he calls Carla/Stacey on Christmas Eve and she comes to him. "He could have been divorced and at least seen his children from time to time, could have quit his job, started something new." But, he had chosen a different path and, on January 3rd, he finally had a confrontation with wife, Laura, and leaves his old home forever with photos of the two children.

Three days later, on January 6 in New York City, "Robert Elgin died on the street, knocked down and run over by a Second Avenue bus while pursuing a woman he thought he could not live without." As he envisioned living a normal life "someplace else" he indeed becomes the invisible man he's always wanted to become. "He was thirty-nine years old...he was running out of money." Thus the demise of the invisible man which mirrors the life of Jack Kerouac, a Sixties guru for the drug generation (somehow, I missed the '60s living in a small town near the Alabama border at a small college raising my two sons.); it reflects his swift slide downwards in his tragic self-destructiveness. Like him, the character of this novel reveals the inner man which is torn by his conflicting desires and beliefs. This is Samuel Ligon's debut novel but his stories have been published in various magazines and collections.