'KILL' Comments

 "Kill your Darlings", a  novel by Bob Quinn

EARLY COMMENTS:

‘I had an image of the universe as one gigantic chord, frozen in time but accessible through the heat of human emotion which melted down little bits in the form of melodies, mere glimpses of the immensity behind them.’

             Wow! You put a major poem in a single sentence.

                                               Kurt Vonnegut jr.

'Kafka goes West, meeting Mann out on the peninsula. Always original, Quinn shaves language making it sparse and spare: to suit his unique focused vision. I like what he's doing in this book. Read it.'

                                                Patrick McCabe

Bob Quinn is a film maker, but this is a highly literary novel, as well as a

knowledgeably musical one. He takes us from the central-European demonism of  Mann's Doctor Faustus to the rural Irish schizophrenia of Patrick McCabe's  Butcher Boy without lifting anything from his precursors. A brisk, unsettling read.

                                                Raymond Deane

Both regional and universal, this is a nightmare tale of surrealist vision – where reality merges with delusion, the Faust legend embroils itself with Kafkaesque science-fiction, a doomed marriage clashes and clangs among the rocks of Connemara, while the whole gallimaufry holds itself together upon a central driving theme of the art of music, its glories, its futilities, its unbreakable power.  A novel of Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, where everything has changed and yet nothing has changed: jealousy, sex, the passion of creation are the dominating forces.

                                                  John Arden

A Fascinating, Dangerously Disturbing Invitation

By W. Gray "The Deacon" (Jacksonville, Florida)

"To be dragged around like a child's rag doll, through a maze of absurd trips, wonderful characters, interesting scenes and treated to dozens of socio-spirtuals dichotomies: sin/grace, good/evil, religion/sex, physical/ethereal, light/dark, sanity/madness; is at once mentally and physically exhausting.... but fun. In an effort to find out just what it is that Moore "wants", we are invited, not told, to see parallels to Faust as he struggles between Bella Bopp, his sometime wife with wifely feelings and encumbrances, and the magnificent Gerhard Dewallisch, his "master" a devilish baritone, for whom our hero accompanies, whose only encumbrances seems to be that he likes "our boy" and needs a good accompanist - and someone to share his seeming depravity. This however, is only one of the invitations. The story is a string of fantastic adventures, from Beecham, England, to Plauen, (East) Germany to a convent in Italy (Oh. wait 'til you get load of this place) to Paris to Ireland. All along the way, a reader gets to pick his "leanings" and sympathies be thay male, female or neutral. At one point, the antagonist (and I think you need to be careful here) refers to sex and religion being on a scales with music at the fulcrum. Indeed, a good grip on mucsicology would definitely be helpful in a read of this book - its almost symphonic, maybe operatic. In the end we are faced with whom to believe. The three main characters all get narrative - all first person - who can tell who is telling the truth. I conclude IT DOESN'T MATTER. I am entertained by these people, the thoughts, the religion, the sex, the scenes...and the music, always, through and through, the music. This is a good book perhaps best enjoyed by people who don't study a lot because they may not be tempted to make odious comparison to other authors, genres and media. Go buy it!"