Customer Reviews

Shooting the Heart

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"What is hell?" asks Father Zossima in Dostoevski's "The Brothers Karamazov". "It is the inability to love." Paul Cody maps the coldest part of hell, the ninth circle reserved for those who betray intimates and benefactors, in this powerful, brilliant, and timely novel. Earl Madden, the mentally disturbed teacher whose obsession with serial killers may or may not have driven him to murder his wife Joan, is no mere clinical case. He is very much a man of this historical moment, a lost soul mourning his alienation from everything he loves in an America that glorifies and sexualizes violence. In a culture where pornographic snapshots of naked and tortured Iraqi prisoners and the footage of Nat Berger's decapitation permeates the Internet, Earl's struggles to maintain his sanity and decency will be all too familiar to most readers. His final defeat after a harrowing inner battle is both a tragedy and a warning. As Oscar Wilde noted, "Each man destroys the thing he loves. The brave man does it with a sword, the coward with a kiss." Cody tempers his novel's bleak naturalism, however, with moments of haunting lyricism, as if he were Theodore Dreiser scattering haikus throughout "An American Tragedy". Some passages demand to be read aloud. All in all, an unforgettable book from an important contemporary writer. Read it and tremble.

This is a must read for fans of Edgar Allen Poe, Stephen King or The Sopranos. Cody's latest novel about thwarted, desperate love is elegant, creepy, beautiful, disturbing, rhapsodic and masterful in its ability to capture the essence of a lost soul. Enter Earl Madden's world, a compressed place where drifters and yearners, sadists and crumpled dreams reside. In prose that is distinctly poetic, you'll find a dissection of the human race in all its darkest glory. The marriage of violence, sex, love and death form an oceanic outpouring that is scary and wondrous down to the last aching words. Cody's creative imagination is fifty yards ahead of the pack.

Jessica Keener, Boston Globe Correspondent

Brookline, MA

Paul Cody has a fantastic idea for a novel in "Shooting the Heart", he really...really does. Upon quoting "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor to begin this saga, I was immediately thrilled. I envisioned the Misfit in a more modern, lengthy work. Something where a character could really develop their psychosis. That's what we got from "Shooting the Heart"....sort of.

It's in the execution that the idea falls short. The psychosis appears forced from the onset. Whether or not this is based from factual experiences, the wording itself fails to adequately enthrall the reader to a point of believing. This leads to a lack of sympathy for the main character- something that is drastically necessary for this novel to work.

The novel manages to skirt around major questions for some time, as many good novels do. However, the author manages to find a way to leave us on the fringes and call it "closure", so to speak. If the author wanted no beginning and no end, he succeeded. Note: He should read "Rules of Attraction" for an adequate in and out sans beginning/ending.

All in all, even with these nuances, the book could have managed. After all, the realist in me wanted to say, "Ok, this could happen," and accept it. In fact, aside from poor word choices, the story really could have ended up believable. Unfortunately, the words come short elsewhere. It simply leaves the reader stumbling over sentences, sometimes needing to read twice. This breaks the illusion and authors are aware of that. The author must have been looking for a new method, but what comes out is a less-than-par Palahniuk knock-off. The double usage of nouns such as, "She. Joan, she <action>" becomes tedious and hard to plunder through after the first few times. Fragmented sentences can sometimes serve to speed up places, give a passage a feeling of panic, or such- however, the overusage in this book once again breaks the illusion and sends us back into reality where we have to analyze the words, not as someone genuinely a part of the story, but more like a reader of a textbook.

"Shooting the Heart" is a decent book for someone fascinated with serial killers who wants to see information put in a more artistic sense. A teenager who liked the awkwardness of Palahniuk may resort in a book like this. Outside of that, it will most likely fail to charm the reader.