Well, I thought you folks might be interested in the final draft of my first review for the Joe Bob Briggs site. I may make a couple of changes, but this is basically what I'm going to be sending in.

By the way, I just received two more books to review in yesterday's post. I'm only a month into this and already have three books waiting to be reviewed. Now I remember what it was like the last time I tried this. :-)

Let me know what you think!

Bay of Souls – by Robert Stone: Published by Houghton Mifflin
Reviewed by Steve Chaput

A couple of years ago Richard Dreyfus starred in a short-lived television show called THE EDUCATION OF MAX BICKFORD. Dreyfus played Bickford, an aging college professor at a small, New England college. Fairly comfortable in his academic position, Bickford still felt unfulfilled emotionally and found that he had lost touch with the faith in which he had been raised, which in Bickford’s case was Jewish.

Imagine now Russell Crowe in the Dreyfus role and his college transplanted to the Midwest, or as he refers to it at one point “Flyover land.” In Stone’s novel, the professor’s name is Michael Ahearn and the faith from which he feels estranged is Catholicism. Ahearn feels a growing emptiness inside, as well as a growing alienation from his wife and son. Even the near death by overexposure of his son doesn’t bring them closer, rather just the opposite.

The only things that Michael seems to enjoy are drinking and hunting with some fellow academics. Even at those points the pleasure is mixed as Ahearn often doesn’t even fire his rifle, allowing the others to kill any deer or other prey.

One day into Michael’s life steps Lara Purcell, a new political science professor with a mysterious past. It’s not long before Michael and Lara are lovers, but there is more to Lara’s past than simply an absent husband. Lara and her late brother were not only involved in espionage, but also drug smuggling and voodoo. In fact, Lara believes that her brother had given her soul away to a voodoo priestess when she was a child. Now that he is dead she wants to get it back.

Stone may be best known for his novel DOG SOLDIERS, which was turned into the film WHO’LL STOP THE RAIN with Nick Nolte. As in that novel, Stone allows his protagonist to be drawn into a situation that not only places his life in danger, but also forces him to learn things about himself that he may not have wanted to know.

To be honest, I don’t think that Stone successfully brings any of these characters to life. They certainly don’t speak in a manner that anyone would normally. Sadly, the book never reads like anything more than a morality play, which the author would like to see brought to the screen by the addition of some exotic locales and a couple of action sequences.

Stone, reminiscent of Peter Benchley in his early novels, is at his best in those few action scenes. In those sections, especially those chapters dealing with a night dive to recover lost property in a downed airplane, it is easy to see why the author does have a loyal following.

Overall, the story doesn’t hold up and the entire thing reads like the draft of a longer novel, which Stone didn’t have time to complete before his deadline.

*****
Now that wasn't so bad, was it?