This collection comprises the three winning entries of the 1996 novella competition judged by George Garrett: TomWhalen’s And Earth on Its Frozen Journey, first place; John S. Walker’s Days of Captivity, second place; and Richard Plant’s Deaths by Drowning, third place. And Earth on Its Frozen Journey is the bitter-sweet initiation chronicle of a group of neighborhood kids who live an almost enchanted life, like Dylan Thomas’s protagonist in Fern Hill, until Time begins to lead them to the darker realizations of death and sex, and the children, green and golden, as Thomas so beautifully put it, follow Him out of grace.
John S. Walker’s band of tortured misfits in Days of Captivity are thrown together at a veteran’s hospital in Virginia. These are men blinded, paralyzed, deafened, and limb-shorn, not so much out of the heroism of war as their own folly. This is the agonizing story of a group of fragmented men trying to enter the real world again, a world of feeling, and their women, wives and girlfriends, who desperately try to help them enter it.
Richard Plant’s Deaths by Drowning takes the reader into an arena of realistic horror as a man and his son try to come to terms with a murder/rape they encounter on a fishing trip. Consumed by his hatred of the man who shot and beat him and disgusted with the ineptitude of law enforcement officials, Gray Morrison takes his pistol and goes among characters reminiscent of the rednecks from Deliverance to exact revenge.
Judged by novelist George Garrett, director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia, these stirring, powerful novellas are a testament to the genre our publishing world cannot seem to find a niche for. More fully developed than short stories but much more compact and focused than novels, the novella is still alive and well in America.
