Another Review at MyShelf.Com

Publisher: Graywolf Press
Release Date: October, 2004
ISBN: 1555974090
Awards:  
Format Reviewed: Paperback
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Genre:   Fiction
Reviewed: 2004
Reviewer: Janine Peterson
Reviewer Notes:  
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Tearjerker
By Daniel Hayes

     A writer, fed up with years of rejection, buys a gun and kidnaps an editor. He keeps the editor in a basement prison he'd constructed, complete with chain link fence, a treadmill, a TV, and bunk beds from Ikea (they were on sale). So begins Daniel Hayes' first novel, Tearjerker.

      The writer, Evan Ulmer, begins to write about the experience, trying to determine his own motivation in kidnapping the man, starting what might become his first successful novel. The two men watch the abduction saga unfold on TV and in newspapers. Evan meets the required love interest at the library, a young girl named Promise.

      The writing is brilliant. I wondered more than once if I was reading Evan's finished manuscript about the abduction or his thoughts during. The story is interrupted occasionally with excepts from what seem to be Evan's diaries, kept faithfully since he was a child. Promise, also a writer-in-training, asks him about the novel he's working on, if it's maybe inspired by the news stories about the kidnapped editor. No, of course not, Evan answers. But Promise is writing a novel of her own, in which a man named Evan starts dating a woman like Promise's own mother. The world of written stories is so intertwined with the "real world" that the reader will have difficulty determining which is which.

      Will either character finish a novel? Will either character get published? And what will Evan do with the man in his basement?

     The writing is so perfect, the narration so enticing and unreliable, that any thinking reader will love every minute of it.