With the release of Spirit of the Amaroq in February, I look forward to a rewarding year. Thanks everyone.

G

Borrowing a Moose head from Cole Porter
By G. Lloyd Helm
Review by Nancy A. Dafoe

Skillfully balancing absurdity with pathos, G. Lloyd Helm creates a portrait of living in middle America that is as surprising as it is deeply affecting. Protagonist Jack Wells takes us on a ride with his family to rural, Peru, Indiana where he continues to ask, “What is wrong with these people?” From the humorous analogy of Broadway on the edge of Peru to New York’s Broadway, Helm lets readers in on extra-diegetic humor even while his characters remain true to the story. Although Jack and his wife, Kathy or Sarge, and son Mitch have lived all over the world through her military assignments, Jack sums up their short time in Indiana in the darkest of terms, at once comedic and striking: “We’ve seen more deaths and darkness and drugs and general awfulness than anywhere else in the world.”

From Helm’s great opening line with his “bad feeling” and foreshadowing, Jack’s first-person narration of his family’s lives and those in this small town, in which farmers and “Base” [Grissom Air Force Base] people mix uncomfortably, is natural. Jack’s son Mitch is a handful and as much trouble as his leading lady Cheryl Menville, who stars with Jack in a theater production of Saving Grace. Mitch’s habit of juggling balls at the oddest times reminds us of Jack juggling his Deacon duties with his amateur acting, leading to near affairs, genuine performances, a parody of the Oscars, drug deals, and military police arrests. Yet, all of life in Peru rings true as we anticipate an Ole Olson Theater performance then head to Author’s for a drink.
This is writing in the hands of an experienced author whose metaphors make you laugh and stop and wonder at the same time: the old Dodge car handling “like a herd of cattle.” Borrowing a Moosehead from Cole Porter is timely and incredibly relevant. It is an American story.