Long Night’s End
-
- $5.99
-
- $5.99
Publisher Description
Johnny Gunn stands atop a bar in downtown New York playing his guitar like there is no tomorrow. Below him the kids scream and stomp, wanting more from the over-the-hill rock band comprised of Johnny and his three childhood friends. As Johnny points his guitar out into the crowd and plays the music at a fever pitch, nobody in the crowd knows that his thoughts are not on the music, but on a tragic loss three years earlier and an uncontrollable anger at his God for the pain wrought upon the Gunn family.
Johnny lives where he grew up―across the river in Sunnyside, Queens―along with his wife Rose and their teenage daughter Ellie. As Johnny fights off his own demons, his friend Jimmy is hurtling toward a dark void created on that sunny day when Jimmy’s brother and father, both firefighters, went down with the towers.
As Johnny tries to save his friend he embarks on his own path of self-destruction, a path fueled by his dependence on alcohol, the rejection of his faith, and the powerful temptation of the voluptuous Molly Farrell. At the same time Rose, urged on by the local priest, seeks to bring another child into the world, a child Johnny is not prepared to love. Johnny’s journey takes him through tragedy, despair and sin. Ultimately he seeks redemption, but to do that he will need to love again and learn to embrace life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rodgers's emotive debut centers on a Sunnyside, Queens, father of two who, at 41, seeks solace from grief and a fruitless advertising job as the leader of a small-time rock band with his high school buddies. Johnny Gunn is perpetually haunted by the death of his son to meningitis three years earlier, calling it a "hell will exist within me forever." He attributes the crushing loss not only to his personal failures as a man, but, as a lapsed Catholic, to the merciless God whom he believes took away his child without reason. His embittered faithlessness, alcoholic binges, and infidelity drives a wedge in his marriage, and though his wife, Rose, wants another child, the couple's attempts to rekindle happiness seem like nonstarters. Meanwhile, Johnny's band is a place for bonding but not healing, as his bandmates contend with their own demons. While the female characters are underdeveloped, Rodgers excels at sensory evocations, whether depicting the bottomlessness of sorrow and anguish, the upended reaction to an unexpected pregnancy, the buzz of alcohol ("kind of glittery and sparkly, like life ought to be") or the oppressive humidity of a New York summer. This will resonate with readers. (Self-published)
