Michael Allen Rose's THE INDIFFERENCE OF HEAVEN is a beautifully haunting book. I can already imagine the weird dreams this will give me.
There's a video on YouTube of Penn & Teller (well, Penn) discussing one of Teller's greatest tricks, called "Shadows". This setup of the trick consists of just a small table with a rose in a jar on it, and a canvas in the back. A spotlight projects the shadow from the rose onto the canvas. Teller then proceeds to use a knife to "cut" the petals in the shadow, making the petals in the actual rose fall off one by one. It's a beautiful, atmospheric trick, and Penn says that it can be done much more easily than the way they do it, but that doesn't matter, what matters is the effect.
That's exactly how I'd describe this book. If you KNOW the ending, you could sum up this book in a single sentence, it's much more high concept than it looks. BUT that doesn't matter. What does matter is how masterfully Michael creates an atmosphere of nightmares and paranoia that sucks you in until you get to that ending. It's incredibly cinematic and vivid, the images pop out of the page onto your face.
If you ask Bizarro fans who are the best Bizarro writers in terms of their craft, the most common answers would probably be Laura Lee Bahr, Autumn Christian, Danger Slater and Violet LeVoit. But they'd be foolish not to include Michael Allen Rose's name to that mix.
Buy THE INDIFFERENCE OF HEAVEN here
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