What is Phillip DePoy reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Phillip DePoy, author of December's Thorn.

His entry begins:

I just finished reading David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and would have to say it’s one of those books that’s so good it made me consider giving up writing and getting into chicken farming. The structure of the novel is astonishing in its sort of Russian Doll construction. The fact that he’s able to write so convincingly in such various styles—a diary, letters, a mystery novel, science fiction—and make them all contribute to a giant arc, it’s just baffling. Outside of John Fowles’s A Maggot, I can’t think of another book so capable of telling a huge story in such a completely new way, almost a new kind of fiction, or a new combination of old forms. So—coming soon...[read on]

About December's Thorn, from the publisher:

"December's thorn, cruelest in the wood, Will give no rose, but still draw blood" —Traditional

Fever Devilin is an academic with a complicated past and an unusual view of the world. A folklorist by training, he's returned to his family home in Blue Mountain, a small town in the heart of Georgia's Appalachian Mountains, where nothing is ever quite what it seems, and the past is always complicated. Still recovering from a near-death experience, Fever is visited by a woman who claims to be his wife. And she's there to deliver some shocking news: Fever has a son.

His friends don't really believe the woman exists—they think she's another hallucination of a mind still slowly recovering from a long-term coma. Fever's fiancée is torn between being outraged and concerned for his mental health. None of this is helped by the fact that Fever, even in the best of times, has a tendency to see things that others don't and that may not, strictly speaking, exist. But when someone starts shooting very real bullets from a very real rifle in Fever's direction, the one thing that everyone can agree upon is that there's something very deadly going on. All Fever has to do is sort out who is trying to kill him—and why—before they succeed.

Learn more about the book and author at Phillip DePoy's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Drifter's Wheel.

The Page 69 Test: A Corpse's Nightmare.

Writers Read: Phillip DePoy (November 2011).

The Page 69 Test: December's Thorn.

My Book, The Movie: December's Thorn.

Writers Read: Phillip DePoy.

--Marshal Zeringue