Synopses & Reviews
"One day unlike the others, hell run into a husband worse than the others, hell run into trouble. I often thought this. Well, I was wrong, it was a woman he ran into, a woman worse than the others, heres what happened." What happened is the shocking tale told deftly by the brilliant French minimalist Christian Gailly in Red Haze. It is a story at once spare and mysteriously complex, complicated by the ever odder perspective of the narrator as the details accumulate. Lucien, the narrators friend, is a rake, a womanizer who womanizes once too often and loses his offending member to his latest conquest. As the narrators interest in the mutilated man and the vengeful woman grows into an obsession, Red Haze becomes an unsettling story of how closely intertwined love and hatred, passion and cruelty can be. Winner of the prestigious Prix France Culture, Red Haze is the third of Christian Gaillys ten novels to be published in English. The first, The Passion of Martin Fissel-Brandt, is also published by the University of Nebraska Press.
Review
"It's the writing that really propels this increasingly creepy story. . . . This isn't a noir novel, but its more unsettling than most noir fiction is. Unpredictable (in both what happens and how it is presented), often unpleasant . . . and yet surprisingly successful."—Complete Review
Review
“[A] clever little novel about obsession and envy.”—Publishers Weekly
Review
"Its the writing that really propels this increasingly creepy story. . . . This isnt a noir novel, but it's more unsettling than most noir fiction is. Unpredictable (in both what happens and how it is presented), often unpleasant . . . and yet surprisingly successful."-Complete Review(Complete Review)
Review
"[A] clever little novel about obsession and envy."-Publishers Weekly
Review
"Red Haze ultimately succeeds in transcending the nihilism typical of many black comedies. Its not until the final few pages that the humor collapses and fundamental questions of life and death come rushing to the fore. . . . Still, its hard to rid ones mind of the novels shifty humor, its clipped and uncertain sentences, its surprising passages of lyricism, its sense of play, its beautiful self-indulgence, all stemming from the narrators love of language."—Andrew Palmer, Rain Taxi Review of Books
About the Author
Brian Evenson is an associate professor in the creative writing program at Brown University. He is the author of Altmann's Tongue (available in a Bison Books edition) and The Wavering Knife, and the translator of Jacques Jouet's Mountain R. David Beus is an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of international cultural studies at Brigham Young University, Hawaii and has translated work by Ludovic Janvier, Eduoard Maunick, and others.