Dennis Must

Description:

In the lyrical novel Circling Toward Nightfall Jeremiah Coombs, its narrator, may be the only man on earth who has two fathers. After being told by Billy Coombs, his father, that he had no mother, Jeremiah’s paternal grandmother discloses that her name was Bernadette who died in childbirth even though Jeremiah vividly recalls her in his early life. A neighbor, “Ichabod” Ernest Tyner, begins to play an increasing role in his life. Ichabod reveals that Bernadette was a Sisters of Conscience nun who gave birth to the boy on the banks of the Ohio River and then drowned herself. When how he was conceived is revealed, a patricidal urge propels Jeremiah to seek vengeance. It is at this juncture that the novel’s truth shows itself. With characters that flow in and out of it, the novel is an enigma.

ADVANCED PRAISE

Dennis Must’s Circling Toward Nightfall is not a standard novel. Rather it is a lyrical rendering of the myth of blood and family. It is a literary reconciliation of the mind/body dualism that has plagued humans from the beginning on our search for origins. The reader of CTN has to drop into mythic mind  to see what the author is doing because Must’s language works on so many levels—mythic, psychological, teleological, whimsical, poetic, biological—that the reader is taken on a journey of discovery that ends with…”one man clinging onto another for dear life…levitating away from the assembled dead, rising above Ohio Valley’s Sunday graveyard … escaping its pull of ennui and malaise.”

Rich in metaphor, concrete in its images, Circling Toward Nightfall opens the reader to the sheer joy of gorgeous writing. It is a novel that requires a commitment from the reader who wants to reap the rewards of great writing—and those rewards are multiple and deep. CTN is a masterpiece.
—Jack Remick, author of Blood; Gabriela and The Widow; and Man Alone

Dennis Must’s posthumously published novel Circling Toward Nightfall is a “late style” coming-of-age story; the age-coming is the “long sleep of death.” Written in compact prose, almost prose poetry, every word counts. Populated by a cacophony of voices from the author’s unconscious, we are told: “The Lafayette Hotel … where your name bears no relevancy . . .  where identities are cribbed from a graveyard of signatures, and doppelgangers cram its hallways lost.” Crafted in mystery genre in the guise of Jeremiah or Jeremiahs, from “Lesson One” to the end of the book, Must’s late style circles its own demise and carries faint echoes of Western humanity’s predicament.
—Rich Murphy, author of Mind of Europe and Americana

Description:

John Proctor, about to turn seventy, spies a disconsolate young man eyeing him from outside his remote studio window. Invited inside from the bitter cold and fed dinner, the visitor, who calls himself Eli, implies that he is no stranger to the man, having been told by his grandmother that “you might take me in.” Astonished to learn that the woman was his wife who decades earlier had aborted their marriage, which lasted “but the length of a wedding candle,” the narrator ruefully explains he has since relished living alone by making no lasting connections to anybody or anything. Whereupon Eli confides, “She also said you had profaned my mother,” the daughter John Proctor never knew he had. Thus commences MacLeish Sq.,a tale of awakened remorse and familial longing recounted by an aging recluse when his life is abruptly upturned by the young visitor—captive to a mythical past of his own creation—who intimates that he and the narrator are unlikely strangers. Their unresolved relationship ultimately challenges the reader to question if he and his coincidental guest are one and the same . . . that Eli may be who the narrator has carefully hidden from himself throughout his adult life.

ADVANCE PRAISE

MacLeish Sq. approaches mythic status in which time, character, past, present, alive, dead—just a few of the literary polarities inhabiting this writing—interact at a level no reader can accept without relinquishing his/her own sense of person and being. Interweaving Dante, Melville, Hawthorne, and Pirandello into a single narrative that seizes the essence of each, Must puts them together with such skill that the author lives on par with the masters. It will take an honest reader to admit—I have never read anything like this.

—Jack Remick, author of Gabriela and the Widow

MacLeish Sq. is a compelling psychological novel about personal identity, about loss, about delusion, and about the power of literature, of story, to make sense of one’s life. This is a world of lost souls. In a work heavily imbued with the irreal, reminiscent at times of Poe, Must’s two doppelganger protagonists, fractured and alienated, wrestle with their haunted pasts in pursuit of authentic selfhood. A masterful work of fiction.—Jack Smith, author of If Winter Comes

Description:

There is an inexplicable gravity in a small town. It can be read and enjoyed like a favorite book for most of its inhabitants. Comforting are its streets and institutions, its wedding and obituary announcements. Banjo Grease is about life and death in a mill town where at each epiphany and rite of passage, the narrator yields a ration of innocence. Characters portray class as a marker as strong as race and gender, and distrust that they will ever escape in their lifetimes. Faulkner uses the term “eager fatalism.” These stories’ cumulative effect asks: When exchanging naivete for worldliness, what is lost in denying one’s past?

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Dennis Must’s first collection of short stories is no ordinary debut but the mature work of a fully accomplished literary artist. Moreover, his originality, his deep irreverence, and his compassion for working-class men and women . . . Strivers and seekers of dreams, signal him as an inspired author in a new American grain—a visionary, poet, and realist . . .”—Tom Jenks, editor (with Raymond Carver) of American Short Story Masterpieces

“Dennis Must’s stunning collection Banjo Grease is just what one hopes for: a series of intriguing, interlocking stories whose cumulative force goes beyond the sum of its parts.”—Geoffrey Clark, author of Jackdog Summer, What the Moon Said, Rabbit Fever

“These stories float through the reader like frozen images. Each one fits into the others unevenly as jagged glass. This is the essence of great fiction at the end of the century; Ray Carver and Thom Jones plowed into some stupendous force that whips along with a tilted wild energy.”—Kate Gale, author of Water Moccasins, Where Crows and Men Collide, and Selling the Hammock

Description:

Ethan Mueller, the narrator of Brother Carnival, has suffered a crisis of faith and is on the brink of taking his own life when he is informed by his father that he has an estranged brother who is an author. Whereupon he is handed a collection of his sibling’s stories and novel excerpts and urged to seek him out. “These stories are his effort to find you, Ethan. He’s been where you are now. Seek him out but it won’t be easy.” In effect, “Christopher Daugherty’s” writings function as the protagonist’s brother in absentia, thus creating the “dialogue” and suspenseful interplay between them. By immersing himself in the pieces, Ethan Mueller’s pursuit of his brother is a quest to discover himself.

Description:

The World’s Smallest Bible chronicles the seriocomic boyhood of Ethan and Jeremiah Mueller in mill town Pennsylvania during the height of World War II. As they lose friends and neighbors to the front lines, the boys try to make sense of the mounting darkness with their imaginations except in their world, no one ever dies. In a private, laconic language, they invent stories that mirror the irrational world around them: a chaplain with bad news becomes the Angel of Death, skeletal Nazis lurk around the corner, and the ghost of a dead playmate taps at their bedroom window in the night. With startling lyricism and narrative grace, Dennis Must has fashioned an indelible vision of the Mueller boys blighted youth.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Told in startling, poetic language, The Worlds Smallest Bible is an ode to the power of the imagination, as two boys in a Pennsylvania town during WWII sustain each other with stories and fabulist visions. Their struggle with the real world the war, teachers, their parents runs through The Worlds Smallest Bible like an obbligato. Dennis Must skillfully combines narrative momentum with lyricism resulting in a novel of extraordinary grace and originality.”—Thaisa Frank, author of Heidegger’s Glasses

“In this darkly comic Bildungsroman, Ethan Daugherty, initially plagued by several manifestations of moral evil both imagined and real comes to understand one indisputable existential truth: The restrictive confines of place in this case, Hebron, Pennsylvania, toxic in practically every respect can maim the soul, kill the human spirit. Reminiscent of Zola, The World’s Smallest Bible brilliantly demonstrates that for all one’s attempts, whether ignoble or noble, to escape one’s seemingly appointed lot, the only way out may be the grave.”—Jack Smith, author of Hog to Hog

Description:

In Oh, Don’t Ask Why, Dennis Must’s dark humor and use of jarringly raw language confront a number of anxieties and complexities with which his characters grapple. From overwhelming sorrow to suicidal reflection, this compilation of stories reaches deep into the internal and touches readers to the core.

“Dennis Must’s splendid new collection Oh, Don’t Ask Why is a worthy successor to Banjo Grease, his first book of stories, and it advances elements from that work: diminution of vitality, dissolution of family, fierce filial loyalties, a mingling of sexual ador, grief, loss, and spiritual and moral anxiety and ambiguity. These elements are not merely threads in the collection’s tapestry but are its very guts and sinew. The glass through which Must’s characters perceive life is definitely noir, and they are daunted by a variety of forces, among them multiple personalities and suicidal longings (hope and despair can exist in the same sentence in a Must story), and many have an aesthetic subtext. Often it seems the sacred can only be defined by and in the presence of the profane–think of Kafka, Flannery O’Connor, Nathaniel West, Hawthorne. This is a darkly funny book that provokes the sort of laughter that dies in your throat as you realize that, as Brecht put it, ‘He who laughs has not yet been told the terrible news.’

In Oh, Don’t Ask Why we can again admire Must’s trademark swift exposition and startling visual coups, and experience his affinity for the perfect detail.

This collection will haunt the reader for a long, long time; as a Fitzgerald notebook entry goes, ‘Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story.’—Geoffrey Clark, author of Wedding in October and Jackdog Summer