Feast Day of the Cannibals
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A bankrupt merchant encounters Herman Melville and is pursued through the depths of Gilded Age Manhattan by a brutal antagonist
In the sixth stand-alone book in The American Novels series, Shelby Ross, a merchant ruined by the depression of 1873–79, is hired as a New York City Custom House appraiser under inspector Herman Melville, the embittered, forgotten author of Moby-Dick. On the docks, Ross befriends a genial young man and makes an enemy of a despicable one, who attempts to destroy them by insinuating that Ross and the young man share an unnatural affection. Ross narrates his story to his childhood friend Washington Roebling, chief engineer of the soon-to-be-completed Brooklyn Bridge. As he is harried toward a fate reminiscent of Ahab’s, he encounters Ulysses S. Grant, dying in a brownstone on the Upper East Side; Samuel Clemens, who will publish Grant’s Memoirs; and Thomas Edison, at the dawn of the electrification of the city.
Feast Day of the Cannibals charts the harrowing journey of a tormented heart during America’s transformative age.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lock flexes a powerful historical imagination in his bleak, transfixing sixth entry in the American Novel series (following The Wreckage of Eden). Shelby Ross recounts his life to childhood friend Washington Roebling, the bedridden chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge, as the two look out on the nearly complete project in 1882. Shelby, a 39-year-old former business owner, lost his fortune in an economic collapse. He is hired to work as an appraiser under a dispirited and volatile Herman Melville (whose novels are forgotten and whose marriage is under intense strain) at the New York Custom House. Shelby makes an enemy of John Gibbs, a coarse and mean weigher, but forms a fast, putatively platonic attachment with the effete and timid 20-year-old Martin Finch. Gibbs suspects there's more than friendship going on between the two men and vacillates between soliciting Shelby himself and attempting to humiliate him, including tricking him into visiting a transvestite brothel where Shelby is assaulted. The second half of the novel jumps forward two years as Shelby explains again in Roebling's room the nightmarish events that led to his recent incarceration. This historically authentic novel raises potent questions about sexuality during an unsettling era in American history past and is another impressive entry in Lock's dissection of America's past.
