Lord Fear
A Memoir
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $14.99
-
- $14.99
Publisher Description
Lucas Mann was only thirteen years old when his brother Josh—charismatic and ambitious, funny and sadistic, violent and vulnerable—died of a heroin overdose. Although his brief life is ultimately unknowable, Josh is both a presence and an absence in the author’s life that will not remain unclaimed. As Josh’s story is told in kaleidoscopic shards of memories assembled from interviews with his friends and family, as well as from the raw material of his journals, a revealing, startling portrait unfolds. At the same time, Mann pulls back to examine his own complicated feelings and motives for recovering memories of his brother’s life, searching for a balance between the tension of inevitability and the what ifs that beg to be asked. Through his investigation, Mann also comes to redefine his own place in a family whose narrative is bisected by the tragic loss.
Unstinting in its honesty, captivating in its form, and profound in its conclusions, Lord Fear more than confirms the promise of Mann’s earlier book, Class A; with it, he is poised to enter the ranks of the best young writers of his generation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the hands of New York author and writing teacher Mann (Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere), a chronicle of his older brother's life before it ended in a heroin overdose becomes a suspenseful, if stilted, character study. Mann both adored and feared his older half-brother, Josh, who died at age 28 when the author was 13. Josh was handsome and brilliant, a bodybuilder, a charming ladies' man, and a sadist to those he loved his mother, his brothers, his girlfriends. By interviewing the people Josh loved and was closest to, author Mann builds the story of his brother's life through narrative reconstruction a creative nonfiction for a fluid account that never allows the reader to be moved. The younger brother is hungry to learn about Josh's transgressions as a way to both remember his brother and gain a kind of self-knowledge. On the one hand, his brother provided a model of manhood as a sexual being, a free spirit, and an artist; yet on the other hand, Josh was fragile and spoiled, gripped by inexplicable anxiety ("lord fear"), given to humiliate people, fond of a terrifying pet boa constrictor, and submerged in debilitating drug use in his 20s. Mann's references to the writing of Nabokov, Philip Roth, Roland Barthes, and Virginia Woolf on memory and loss lend the work an elegiac tone, but all the feeling here is cold and hard.
