Back in March the Decatur Public Library hosted a panel called “The Sophomore Slump: Writing the Second Book,” about the landmines confronting authors who have published a successful first book. The local panelists included Jack Riggs, Renee Dodd and Thomas Mullen.
The evening wasn’t the most memorable (I recorded no blog entry), but Thomas Mullen did make made an impression on me. He discussed his own first book, The Last Town on Earth (2006), a fictional story of a secluded logging and mill town in Washington State that quarantines itself during the 1918 flu pandemic. Of course, by now we’ve all been saturated for months with news reports of H1N1 flu going global. When Mullen posted an entry recently on his own blog about the irony of publishing this book this year, it reached critical mass for me and I went over to Blue Elephant Book Shop and bought a copy.
Last Town was a decent book. Mullen’s prose style is solid and workmanlike, and his episodic treatment of the subject created a suspenseful buildup throughout. Since I’m not that versed in historical fiction, I hesitate to be overly critical or laudatory of this book. But comparisons by one reviewer to Albert Camus’ The Plague seem way out of place. (I mean, there are no memorable lines like “I’ve been feeling much more at ease here since plague settled in.”) Mullen’s book does remind me of John Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy, which recalled the days before America was a superpower and the resistance to a world war (WW I) that was considered by some to be an economic and political strategy disguised as patriotism. (Does this sound familiar?) Dos Passos and Mullen vividly capture the dangerous conditions faced by many workers during that time and the difficulties faced by those who organized to fight back.
Since Mullen’s second book is scheduled to be published next year, he must have overcome the perils of his own Sophomore Slump. I’ll be curious to follow up on it.
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