Unspeakable Horror!

With The Rest Is Illusion, author Eric Arvin channels Christopher Rice to create an engaging debut that’s equal parts A Density of Souls and The Snow Garden with a decidedly early-VC Andrews vibe. Add a liberal dose of dreamlike mysticism and a touch of the supernatural for good measure, and you’ve got a gripping tale that’s at once edgy and heartrending.

Set on the fictional campus of Verona College, The Rest of Illusion introduces a quintet of characters whose lives intersect in the multi-story arc tradition of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. The cast of characters includes the daughter of a conservative Baptist minister who struggles with her desire to both break the parental chains that bind her and come to grips with an unrequited love for a terminally ill gay friend, an albino whose off-putting physicality makes him a social outcast, a closeted frat house jock, and a nefarious politician’s son who compensates for indifferent parents by acting as puppet master to those he perceives as weak. With the exception of the somewhat clichéd closeted football hero, the main characters are drawn well here and spring from the page as three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood people. Minor characters are a mixed bag – while the mousy co-ed who serves as the fourth quarter conclusion-driving catalyst is interesting and well-developed, there’s a distracting hillbilly-like fraternity house mother who rings false and the incongruous introduction of a character late into the third act.

Nowhere are the existential forces at work throughout the novel more reflected than in the dialogue, heady ruminations that both belie the characters’ ages and beguile with their humanistic insightfulness:

“The world has to hide its magic now, in deep valleys and dark forests. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you chance upon the honesty of the natural world.” He led her farther down the creek bed. “Mostly, though, the magic of the world lies hidden under the brush and bramble of human misgivings and harsh imaginings that we associate with reality. It makes me sad.”

The novel is ripe with the elements of good thriller – racing against time and terminal illness, lurid blackmail, revenge plots and descents into madness – set against a thoughtfully told coming of age tale and the enchantment of first love. In the hands of a lesser writer, the narrative could wander and stray all over the place, but Arvin does a remarkable job keeping the story on target as it powers toward a tense, slow-motion denouement when the narrative strands irrevocably crisscross. To both Arvin’s credit as a storyteller and to the disadvantage of the novel’s compact 178-pages, readers will find themselves hungering for more from the intriguing back stories of the various characters which beg to be fully explored here with a smattering of well-placed flashbacks.

Arvin is a writer of the old-school variety, an old soul literary auteur who clearly loves language and the symmetry of words. His prose is lyrical, rich in imagery and poeticism. His command of description is steeped in metaphors and personification that imbue the action with a lushness that coats the eyes and mind:

The canopy above them was like the dome of a crystal cathedral and they were its worshipers. Smaller trees, somber parishioners, stood nearby on the banks and hills, unmoving and prayerful. Fallen timber were suddenly pews for the setting, the silver air was the songbook.

It’s refreshing to read a novel that sparkles with Arvin’s clear euphoria for language, so much so that it’s easy to forgive the occasional clunky turn of phrase. And while Arvin indulges in lavish assemblages of words, he also skillfully holds back when it comes to nurturing the reader’s imagination as when the reader is left to fill-in the blanks as to what terminal illness the gay protagonist faces or what salacious misdeeds are concealed in the dossiers the antagonist keeps on his victims. It’s a carefully orchestrated ballet of literary decadence and narrative restraint – one that Arvin dances to near perfection in this auspicious debut novel.