After reading two recent impressive novels (Citizen Vince and The Zero) by Jess Walters I have decided to go back and read his first two novels. The first of which is Over Tumbled Graves. The title comes from an epigraph from T.S. Eliot’s seminal poem “The Waste Land”:
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves.
In fact, Walters states in an interview in the back of the
book that he has tried to write a parallel structure with the poem in the
novel. I can’t judge whether he has achieved this aim or not because I can’t
remember the poem clearly, but I am sure that it was studied at some point in
my undergraduate English literature career. However, this detail accurately
identifies this as a “literary thriller.” Walters has done an admirable job of
characterization in bring alive detectives Allan Dupree and Caroline Mabry not
to mention humanizing the prostitute victims like Rae-Ann, which he identifies
as one of his goals in the novel. He also wanted to expose the cynical economy
of crime with the media, which is especially applicable to serial killers.
Which brings us to another aspect of the novel that hit s home a little too
close, Walters reported on several serial killer cases while working as a
journalist in my hometown of Spokane: “the coin shop killer” and Cory Bartell
who confessed to Walters. This confession led to his intent to personify “the
banality of evil” that killers like Bartell possessed. He was angry with
Walters for identifying the wrong type of baseball bat he used to kill his
mother in an experiment to see if he could get away with murder. Furthermore
soon after the publication of the novel Richard Yates, a killer of prostitutes
in Spokane was arrested suggesting Walters had drawn from that, when in
actuality it was written before. Another of Walters’s intentions was to
personify the city of Spokane as the setting for the novel. I think this is an
extremely successful first novel. It is philosophic, compelling, entertaining, and
well written with well-developed characters. As a bonus, the P.S. edition has
an interview, a back story explanation, list of recommended books, and summaries
of his other books including an excerpt from his latest.
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