So Many Doors
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
The legendary lost crime novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Oakley Hall, instructor of Ann Rice, Amy Tan, Richard Ford, and Michael Chabon, who calls SO MANY DOORS "Beautiful, powerful, even masterful."
It begins on Death Row, with a condemned man refusing the services of the lawyer assigned to defend him. It begins with a beautiful woman dead, murdered - Vassilia Caroline Baird, known to all simply as V. That's where this extraordinary novel begins. But the story it tells begins years earlier, on a struggling farm in the shadow of the Great Depression and among the brawling "cat skinners" of Southern California, driving graders and bulldozers to tame the American West. And the story that unfolds, in the masterful hands of acclaimed author Oakley Hall, is a lyrical outpouring of hunger and grief, of jealousy and corruption, of raw sexual yearning and the tragedy of the destroyed lives it leaves in its wake. Unpublished for more than half a century, So Many Doors is Hall's masterpiece, an excoriating vision of human nature at its most brutal, and one of the most powerful books you will ever read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this somewhat dated tale of murder and obsession from Hall (1920 2008), first published in 1950, bulldozer operator Jack Ward seduces a California rancher's daughter, Vassila "V" Baird, and the two begin a steamy affair. Set in the years around WWII, the novel starts off in Bakersfield and the Central Valley and moves to San Diego, where Jack and V get married. Eventually, their relationship falls apart and ends in cold-blooded murder. The fuse lit to ignite a James M. Cain style atmosphere burns slow, and the clashes between Jack and V often come off as hysterical melodrama. The two leads prove less interesting than peripheral characters such as the idealistic Ben Proctor and Marian Huber with her petty jealousies. On the plus side, Hall (Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades and four other mysteries set in 1880s San Francisco) provides plenty of fascinating detail about the lives of the "cat skinners" who handled the big excavating and paving equipment of that era. In this early novel, he may have created his own subgenre: Road Grader Noir.
