Review: Not Your Mother's Love Story
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 19, 2012
Hold it. This is NOT you mother's boy-meets-girl book. RABBIT IN THE ROAD is the amazing, genre-straddling debut by Oliver Campbell and Danika D. Potts. Is it literary horror? Psychological Thriller? Paranormal Mystery? The book is all of these, a spellbinding psychedelic trip, a shimmering novella with a shattering voice. It deals with love and hate between two not so normal shape-shifters. It is violent. It is tender. It's about running from and running toward at the same time. It's about bliss and the dark night of the soul. It's about all that is in us.But it is Bevie's story. In 1966 a record store clerk meets Ray, the man of her dreams on a train. She takes him home. "Ray gave me a brief hug. It made fireworks go off behind my eyes."And the girl experiences for the first time what she calls "the gleam," something akin to a paranormal power or the might derived from a drug-induced trip."I wanted to slap my hand into his, quest along the gleam with him, to feel that deep connection. I wanted to hear it in my bones, truth or lie, souls met or falling away."Ray knows her, she avows, as if they had been together since before the world turned. She, the shape-shifting Bevie, experiences obsessive bliss, and through her story so exquisitely told, so do we.If it is about fatal attraction, RABBIT IN THE ROAD is also about escape, and the character we first know as Bevie morphs into others, wanders, quests for purification, seeks to quench her hunger for she knows not what. Along the way she meets various shaman-like figures. Shurlock John is one of my favorites ("A coyote ain't a dog, wont never be a dog ...") He's the character that gives Bevie the moniker, "Rabbit in the Road."Does she find peace? What happens to Ray? You'll have to read the book and I highly recommend that you do. A word of caution: there is violence. But it is a book to be savored.