series, featuring a former Ohio State and Cleveland Browns quarterback turned investigator, and editor of Columbus Noir. His stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Mystery Magazine, the 2022 anthology Paranoia Blues: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Paul Simon, and other magazines and anthologies. Kirkus calls his new crime novel, The End of the Road, "A crackerjack crime yarn chockablock with miscreants and a supersonic pace.”
[ My Book, The Movie: An Empty Grave; Q&A with Andrew Welsh-Huggins; The Page 69 Test: An Empty Grave]
At CrimeReads he tagged five "books that incorporate some elements of the Odyssey into modern stories," including:
This Tender Land, by William Kent KruegerRead about the other entries on the list.
Author and mythology expert Joseph Campbell included Odysseus’ travels among several archetypal “hero journeys.” Krueger’s stand-alone novel is a masterfulblend of such narratives, including Huckleberry Finn. But nods to the Odyssey abound. Rivers, including the Minnesota and Mississippi, take the place of the Aegean as Odysseus “Odie” O’Bannion and his companions paddle their way toward St. Louis and his aunt’s house on Ithaca Street. Other allusions include Odie and company’s encounter with Jack, a one-eyed farmer who imprisons them for a while in a shed a la the Odyssean cyclops. (In this telling, it’s Odie’s brother, Albert, who takes the name “Norman .. neither boy nor man,” a play on the name Odysseus uses—“No One”—to fool the cyclops.) Likewise, Odie struggles with the notion that he was cursed by an evil “Tornado God,” hearkening to Odysseus’s antagonistic relationship with Poseidon. That “vengeful spirit,” Odie laments, “had attached itself to me and had followed me everywhere.”
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
