Bonneville Stories
Some blame God, others blame kismet, and still others rail against random happenstance.
In Bonneville, good people lose limbs, fight lightning, and slip into sinkholes. They pitch over bicycles, tumble off ladders, and expire without warning. They spin the wheel and take their chances.
It’s all in a day’s work.
“Mark Doyon’s compulsively readable fiction presents a fascinating and frightening version of a world where (mis)fortune rules.” —Scott Donaldson, biographer of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Cheever
“Doyon’s skills as a storyteller are well-developed, and his text is marked by a clean incisive prose that shows little sign of affectation or device… Perhaps the ruling theme in Bonneville Stories is one of desperation. Some of the Shenandoah locals make a brief sojourn through or past desperation, becoming more whole in the process, while others reside there, becoming monoliths stuck in a nearly existential paralysis of indecision and/or self-absorption. If Doyon has a moral point it’s perhaps that, while there are no promises in this sphere, to stand still is to court the thunderbolt. Bonneville Stories is a brisk, fascinating read, and we recommend it without reservation.” —Charles Allen Wyman, The Absinthe Literary Review
“Perfect… The sheer power of Bonneville Stories is enough to make you gasp and stare. It’s not the power of wild violence or explicit sex; it is a more subtle strength, the strength of imagining the worst of everyday life… This is a brilliant collection of beautifully written stories that made me cringe, grimace, and laugh, while sometimes moving me to great pity. There just aren’t any flaws here, and I can’t possibly do this book justice in a review — no one could, really… You simply must read this one for yourself.” —Laurie Edwards, CultureCartel
“Doyon has what all great writers have: that special something that makes their work compulsively readable, and characters that live on in our imaginations until, with time, we’re not sure if they were real or just people we’ve read about… Doyon’s characters are more real to us because he manages to instill in his writing slices of reality that hit us where we live, marking us forever with a sudden truth about the human condition. And isn’t that what great art is all about?” —Robin Landry, The Compulsive Reader
“These are stories you can’t put down, characters so real they could be your neighbor. Doyon has a way of making his quirky backwater protagonists into heroes and heroines — you end up rooting for them to succeed despite their often pathetic, frequently desperate natures.” —Bernadette Geyer, berniE-zine
“Very good in an unusual sort of way that grips you without you knowing.” —BookLore UK
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