The image of the book as a means of realizing the image of the «Absent father» in the stories of David Bell and Ken Bruen
Authors:   Ukrainian State University of Chemical Technology, Kolisnyk Н. 
Published: June 2024

The work of David Bell and Ken Bruen is well known to English-speaking fanatics of detectives and thrillers. Their novels regularly hit the bestseller lists and receive favorable reviews from literary critics. But they have not yet become the object of a distinct literary study. But if you take into account that both D. Bell and K. Bruen skillfully combine the artistic qualities of crime stories and deep psychology in their works, it becomes obvious that the writers' works require a more detailed analysis. The subjects of our research were the short stories «Rides a Stranger» by D. Bell and «The Book of Virtues» by K. Bruen, which were included in the collection «BIBLIOMYSTERIES: Crime in the World of Books and Bookstores». The collection became a professional challenge for authors who work in thriller genres, as only short stories were accepted for it, the plot core of which was a book. D. Bell and K. Bruen complied with all the specified requirements and even more: in both stories, the central image of the book is inextricably linked with the image of the father. More precisely, they are related to the image of the "absent father" - one of the most relevant topics in modern psychology, the study of which also provoked the appearance of numerous literary studies in the field of modern literature. The aim of the work was to identify means of interaction between the image of the book and the image of the «absent father» in the stories of D. Bell «Rides a Stranger» and K. Bruien «The Book of Virtues». The relevance of the work is determined, first of all, by a small number of literary studies of the writers' work, taking into account their considerable popularity among readers. Secondly, the image of the father in the work of writers is insufficiently developed, despite the rather high relevance of this topic among psychological and literary studies of modern literature. It was established that the plot of both novels has a similar structure, but the writers depicted different types of the «absent father». D. Bell created the image of a father who is «absent» in the son's life due to detachment, reluctance to communicate, and K. Bruen portrayed a version of «absent» due to the aggression of the father, whose authoritarianism forces the son to remove any parental presence from his life. But in both stories, the role of a psychological trigger is played by the appearance of a book inherited from the father. The very fact of its appearance prompts the heroes to a kind of revision of their own idea of their father. In one case, this contributes to the creation of a situation of reconciliation of the hero with his father and the past in general, and in another, the book turns out to be powerless against the stability of the formed parental stereotype and becomes a decisive factor in the downfall of the main character. Key words: image of the book, image of the father, «absent father», parental stereotype, American literature, Irish literature.