After K. C. Wilson submitted his novella, Doing the Dead – 1983, for publication in Faraway, he sent me a signed copy of his novel The Route.  I was blown away by both pieces of writing.  Throughout December, Faraway will be serializing Wilson’s Doing the Dead – 1983, but as a preview of Wilson’s talent, read my review of The Route below:

 

          In The Route, author K. C. Wilson brings 1980s North Florida alive as he follows would-be writer Peter Foster on an unending quest to see his screenplay turned into a movie.  Foster, divorced and long estranged from his children, is a failure in the eyes of the world.  But as Wilson weaves a delicate tapestry of friendship, music, comedy, and tragedy, Foster is developed into a lovable, memorable character.
          As Wilson explains, “the ‘route’ presents a series of distractions from [Foster’s] long range plans. . .”  These distractions range from the mundane to the tragicomic: begging a place to sleep each night from his friends, wrestling with his conscience over snagging money no one will miss, wrestling with a deranged neighbor over a gun.  But as he travels the route, Foster learns valuable lessons about his life, his friends, and his children.

          What is perhaps most interesting about Peter Foster is that he is based on a real person, Bruce Kerr.  Wilson described him as “Scheherazade, telling stories to stay alive one more day, only in his case, it was to keep living in my house.  Through him I came to see into the microcosm of the neighborhood.  Behind every door was another world, complete unto itself.  He would enter those worlds and pass through them in a slow walk and bring their stories back to me.”  And this is essentially The Route, a Floridian Arabian Nights in which Foster plays a part in all 1,001 stories.

          Many of the tales are inconsequential or even embarrassing for Foster.  But at times they are transcendental, and can leave the reader on the brink of tears.  And through the lowly Peter Foster, author K. C. Wilson skillfully reveals truths about time, disappointment, success, failure, and even love.

Wilson’s writing is superb.  The Route is humorous but bittersweet, vulgar but sublime.  The writing is simultaneously reminiscent of the works of Kerouac, Vonnegut, and, to this reviewer, the films of Wes Anderson.  Wilson paints a world in which there are many non sequiturs (a fish falling from the sky) but within that world, everything seems to make sense.

 

          The Route is available from Amazon.  Faraway is also proud to publish K. C. Wilson’s newest original novella, Doing the Dead – 1983.