Harm's Way
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"I am unacquainted with evil, there being no mirrors here," begins the testimony of Ethan Harms, hero of Harms' Way, Thomas Rayfiel's dark depiction of prisoners and prison life. Harms' Waytakes us into the chilling world of a super-max detention facility where America's most psychotic killers are kept in solitary confinement. Yet as we get to know Ethan and explore this world through his wry humor and tragic sense of destiny, we find ourselves uncomfortably at home. We meet Cooney, serial murderer and successful author; Stanley, whose "Halloween-mask features…slack lips and holes-for-eyes" conceal a cunning sadist; Crow, a mute Native American who can spin a man"s head 180 degrees so that one hears "minute bones snapping like breadsticks"; and Littlejohn, the dazzlingly handsome new arrival whose victims' mouths were found sealed shut with Super Glue. These "monsters" become as familiar to us as the numbing routine and casual violence of a life lived without hope. While Ethan negotiates this perilous landscape, trying to find redemption, trying to understand his actions, we begin to wonder how much of a difference there is between a prison of steel bars and razor tape and a prison erected by the nature of the human soul itself. In either instance, if one escapes, what lies beyond? In Harms' Way, Thomas Rayfiel delivers a gripping read that also poses disturbing questions about our fundamental qualities as moral beings, about the inherent vices and virtues of our much-vaunted "humanity."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ethan Harms, the narrator of this intense, claustrophobic novel from Rayfiel (Time Among the Dead), is serving a life sentence for multiple murders in a nameless maximum security prison somewhere in the northern U.S. He leads a cold, cruel existence, with no privacy. Virtually all of his fellow prisoners have dangerous quirks, such as Crow, who doesn't speak but can turn violent quickly, and Raymond Cooney, the author of a bestselling book about his killing spree who has filed suit against the warden and the prison. Harms fights for little victories avoiding the pills that he's supposed to take; trying to control his interview sessions with visiting doctoral candidate Roberta Bush, who's collecting data for a study; and managing the warden, who wants him to get information from Cooney about the killer's victims. The suspense grows once Harms finds an item in the exercise yard that could improve his situation. Those who like unsparing depictions of prison and the men who inhabit its lower rungs with little hope will be rewarded.
