“There are dead people in my head.” From the opening line to last, The Value of Rain by Brandon Shire seizes your heart and does not let go, even long after the book is closed. The story of a family that fuses love to hatred and life to death and rolls those two fusions together, so that it is impossible to ever separate them. Though only a few scenes take place in New Orleans, The Value of Rain echoes the southern gothic tradition, entangled and hidden bloodlines and all. Indeed Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty would be comfortable in this world, and would be envious of the writer. The characters are strong in their weaknesses, and their strengths always betray them. A first act of physical love propels a young boy from his already precarious existence into the living hell of a psychiatric hospital for a hideous ‘cure’ for his gayness. Charles’s non-chronological narrative of his journey through that hell, and all that follows, is told with an unerring eye for detail, both physical and emotional. The Value of Rain also shows the strong emotionally warping effect of revenge; given the chance to escape, to just be loved for himself, Charles finds he can not let go of the emotional and deadly pas de deux with his mother Charlotte. This is a lyrically beautiful book, masterfully woven with intense emotion, insightful and frightening in its clarity.
note: originally published August 26,2011 on And the world spins madly on