In an Empty Room

When a Marine fireteam searches an isolated Vietnamese village believed to be a supply depot for the Viet Cong an IED explodes, leaving only one survivor of the five-man unit. But who is he: Bunny, Hillbilly, Poke, Injun, or the LT ? Because he is horribly burned, disfigured, and unable to speak, the military doctors don’t know, but the people back home in a coal mining camp in southern West Virginia think they know. Most unsettling of all the survivor himself isn’t certain who he is.

Spanning the landscape from Vietnam’s war-torn jungles to hardscrabble Appalachia, In An Empty Room is a gripping examination of time, memory, consciousness, and selfhood and suggests unanticipated conclusions about the nature of human identity.

Appearances to the contrary, In An Empty Room is not just another Vietnam War novel, even if it is another Vietnam War novel. What this book is really about is the nature of consciousness. As with most war stories, we’re asked to consider how the dislocating trauma of war exorcises public demons at the expense of individual hearts and minds and bodies, and what it means for a world so afflicted to ask so much of its citizens. But that’s only, and quite literally, half the story, rendered in first and second and third persons. The other half makes this that rare novel which comprises a journey into the thicket of a wounded mind, a mind searching for an identity to serve as evidence of this empty room we call the self. -Joe Amato, author of Samuel Taylor’s Last Night