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Exquisite Corpse
Issue 8A Journal of Letters and Life

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Tideland's Humorous Noiritude
by Kevin P. Q. Phelan
Author's Links

Tideland, by Mitch Cullin
Dufour Editions, Chester Springs, Pa.
192 pp.

The radio is always on in Tideland. It fills the background of the story with waves of whispering voices telling stories about the fractured world outside. There is heavy traffic on the Interstate. Some men died in vats at a chocolate factory. And love song after love song ends with a broken heart.
     To a novelist, though, what the radio conveys is not as important as the ear that is listening. The attentive ear in Mitch Cullin's wonderfully dark new novel is Jeliza-Rose, a precocious 11 year old who plays with disembodied Barbie dolls, chases squirrels and talks to fireflies on the edge of an abandoned quarry. While wandering these fields in a remote part of Texas, she encounters a mangled and charred schoolbus. Weeds have patiently overtaken the seared metal, flakes of paint and shards of glass are sprinkled across the ground, and rising above it all is the ominous echo of the disaster that preceded the wreckage.
     The echos of human disasters surround Jeliza-Rose for the rest of the novel. Her mother lays dead from an o.d. in a Los Angeles apartment. Noah, her aging rockabilly guitarist father, trades his Buick Riviera for a bag of Pamergan, Fortral, and Methadone. Then whisks his daughter to Texas by Greyhound because there are a lot of places to hide in Texas. While he stares at the cracked ceiling and walls of the crumbling farmhouse, Jeliza-Rose drifts outside where more fractured lives are tugged by mysterious tides. Dell wanders the neighboring property in a beekeper's hood as her semi-retarded brother Dickens plays with sticks of dynamite.
      Cullin's dark and often humorous prose moves deftly across this bleak landscape, like wisps of smoke rising in the stark, serene quiet that follows a crash. In the middle of the story, a ghost tells Jeliza-Rose, "Go now, go to where you came from, where you belong." But after a crash, there is no will toward movement, no belonging, only a lingering stillness where the wounded are difficult to disentangle from the wreckage, and the only hope is in imagining that relief will arrive. And it does. Not for Jeliza-Rose but for readers who will be sustained by each page of this vivid novel.


ISSUE 8 HOME || BROKEN NEWS || CRITIQUES || CYBER BAG || EC CHAIR || FICCIONES || THE FOREIGN DESK
GALLERY || LETTERS || POESY || REVIEWS || SERIALS || STAGE & SCREEN
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