At his well-attended reading on February 3rd at the Decatur Public Library, Thomas Mullen provided insights that were helpful in understanding his new book The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers, a novel set in the Midwest during The Great Depression. The main plot of the book centers around Jason and Whit Fireson, two notorious bank robbing brothers (and the women who loved them) who steal from not only banks but from death itself—by being able to be resurrect themselves even after being perforated by bullets.
One question for readers of the book is whether they can buy the supernatural premise “of crooks that death cannot hold,” which pushes Firefly from a historical novel similar to Mullen’s first book The Last Town on Earth (which I wrote about earlier) more towards the zombie genre.
Perhaps since I grew up in the Midwest, (near a small city that bank robbers allegedly avoided because the railroad trains prevented quick getaways), I noticed there was little texture of the Midwest. I just found myself wanting more details and anecdotes than just a laundry list of towns and bank jobs – things like the weather and terrain, the crops (corn is king), the iconic radio stations, and examples of the dry humor of the no-nonsense rural types who inhabited my childhood.
After attending a couple of Mullen’s appearances and emailing with him, I do believe the hard-working author is capable of reaching that next level of writing that he professes to admire -- that of the literary page turner (books like Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, and Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union). But with Firefly Brothers, he’s just not there—yet.
P.S.: Mullen’s publisher Random House provided me with a review copy of Firefly Brothers. Coincidently, this week’s photo comes from the movie Road to Perdition. I happened to be in Chicago on the day they were filming some street scenes.
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