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Ebook Details
  • 06/2017
  • 9780989425636 0989425630
  • 366 pages
  • $4.99
Paperback Details
  • 06/2017
  • 9780989425629 0989425622
  • 366 pages
  • $16.99
Paperback Details
  • 06/2017
  • 9780989425629 0989425622
  • 366 pages
  • $16.99
Charles Porter
Author
Flame Vine

Adult; General Fiction (including literary and historical); (Market)

The 2nd installment in the Hearing Voices Series and Charles Porter’s prequel to the award-winning Shallcross (2015), Flame Vine is a deep dive into living with the chaos of hearing voices and the search for safe places to shelter from the storm. A tightly-woven tale with themes of self-erasure, fear, hallucination and the joys in between, Flame Vine carries the reader through the life of Aubrey Shallcross which happens to be punctuated by schizophrenic episodes shared by Triple Suiter and Amper Sand, the voices in Aubrey’s head. In a masterful way Porter transports the reader into the world of voice hearers, introducing us to the good voices —and the bad —to self-medication through addiction, and acting out on impulses. The condition of hearing voices is not always pathological, and many voice hearers do not come forward or tell anyone for fear of being discriminated against. This is not a story about paranormal powers, nor is it fantasy or magic realism. This fictional piece is taken from the real world, the scientific world, and South Florida’s cultural landscape, except Porter’s theory about slippers — voices one hears in their head that live on the neuronal roads and in the vast, unknown spandrels of the brain. The reader does not have to believe in slippers, but the author does.

Reviews
Blue Ink

The fascinating and disturbing novels of South Florida writer Charles Porter reveal a mind in glorious torment, if such a state exists. By clinical definition, Porter is a schizophrenic—given to auditory hallucinations, paranoid terrors and crises of identity. Here, Porter follows his earlier success Shallcross with an equally accomplished prequel.

Flame Vine traces the harrowing (yet often joyful) life of his clearly autobiographical character Aubrey Shallcross from ages eight to 42, and in its often dream-driven pages we meet a man whose mind is in thrall to a pair of commanding voices he calls “slippers:” the good one, called “Triple Suiter” (or “Trip”) delivers Aubrey from self-destruction, while the evil “slipper” is a demon called “Slim Hand,” who wreaks havoc.

As he grows from a dark, Catholic-inflected childhood into manhood, Aubrey runs with entertaining Florida bar buddies called the Blue Goose Bunch (one’s Vietnam-baked; another huffs Freon), heads up a local band, falls for a difficult woman called Leda, sells cars, rides in rodeos and does lots of deep thinking. He sees his fevered brain not as damaged but as “a land of spirits.” “Triple Suiter” may have the most cogent explanation of his “host’s” mind, expressed in some of Porter’s best prose: “The brain is a pacific of prairies, forests, flats, oceans and sometimes storms. We slippers are there. When someone hears us and tells a doctor, the doctor calls it schizophrenia.”

At times, Porter’s writing can be an odd mashup of his stated influences—Rimbaud, Jules Verne, William Burroughs, Henry Miller, Cervantes. Sample: “And I wonder if I was deep into fixing weed eaters, like Punky, would I be picking my nose all the time about this ground-glass existential in my stomach?”

Small complaint. In the literature of madness—or what poses as madness—Flame Vine stands tall. Good news: Its brave and talented author promises a sequel to Shallcross to complete his mind-boggling trilogy.

Kirkus Reviews

Porter’s prequel to Shallcross (2015) explores the first 42 years of a South Florida man living with hallucinations.

Although the author says in a foreword that his two books may be read in any order, readers of the first might have been glad to have this one to guide them through protagonist Aubrey Shallcross’ allusive, surreal, and word-drunk world. In first- and third-person narration, Porter tells the story of Aubrey’s early years, beginning with his upbringing in Stuart, Florida.

 

After he’s born in 1944, he seems to live a comfortable life. He goes to school and graduates from college, marries, works in and later takes over his father’s Chrysler dealership, rides in rodeos, goes surfing, takes drugs, plays in a rock band, builds a house, and develops a circle of close friends called the Blue Goose bunch after their favorite bar. Everyone knows that Aubrey talks to himself, but few know about his “drifties” (extended fantasies) or his “slippers,” hallucinatory figures whom he can speak with and sometimes see. One of the latter is Triple Suiter, nicknamed “Trip,” who’s three inches tall and originates in a mole on Aubrey’s skin.

The book shows how Aubrey’s relationship with his “slippers” develops; he’s shaken at first, but then Trip becomes a kind of guardian angel, helping him through crises of loneliness, guilt, and fear. Porter also devotes several chapters to Aubrey’s friends, giving them back stories and showing how they develop the tight bonds and rich patois seen in Shallcross; they also effectively display the author’s gifts for characterization and dialogue.

Porter has a fine sense of the sublime, and even when he describes horrors, such as the Vietnam War or the actions of a serial murderer, he always offers readers something more complicated than mere repulsion. As with the previous book, the most impressive thing about Aubrey’s hallucinatory world isn’t its strangeness but how it all fits together, poetically, as a creative response to suffering. For example, Triple Suiter gets his name because Aubrey’s much-loved father always wore a three-piece suit to Mass; the suit is an image of love, protection, and certainty.

Another beautifully original, striking, and poetic novel.

Formats
Ebook Details
  • 06/2017
  • 9780989425636 0989425630
  • 366 pages
  • $4.99
Paperback Details
  • 06/2017
  • 9780989425629 0989425622
  • 366 pages
  • $16.99
Paperback Details
  • 06/2017
  • 9780989425629 0989425622
  • 366 pages
  • $16.99
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