Stat®Rec recently published a wonderfully erudite and precise review by John Mirkovic of The Moth for the Star (7.13 Books). An extract is re-published below, but please visit the original site for the full review, linked below. Mirkovic’s review opens:
In The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, the urban sub-chaos softly closes with the image of the Arthurian Fisher King, sitting upon the shore, waiting for his chosen successor, wondering “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” In his slim yet cinematically plot-driven novel, The Moth for the Star, James Reich sits atop a similarly bereft world, and when he sets about destroying his lands, you will feel it viscerally, and not see the masterful ending coming.
From The Waste Land to Reich’s first page, in the way he tells us that Charles Varnas is “quite simply, a dark-haired man in a pale suit who had been on a long voyage,” we sit with the protagonist on a sand dune in Egypt in 1925 with the gentleness of Antoine de St. Exupery’s Le Petit Prince. But we are not to linger in this peaceful imagery for long, for on the same first page, the mood on the North African sand swings sharply from The Little Prince to the darkness of Camus’s L’Étranger. We are now with a man who has just murdered someone, still in the panting breaths of super-oxygenated clarity. Or perhaps we are witnessing his incomplete memory of the encounter. It’s hard to tell. READ MORE…
Purchase a copy of The Moth for the Star from Amazon, or from your local independent bookstore.
