The Spell: A Romance

With The Spell, Tom Clark gives us a Romance for the new millennium - a wildly funny poetic novel about the survival of medieval chivalric codes in a toxic-shocked postmodern world.

Our hero is Big Jesus Toomer, a messianic Great Plains prophet and former high-school football star. His fair maiden is Nivene, an edgy, spooky honkytonk chanteuse, "a fluttering butterfly / flung flimsy-winged from a funnel cloud / to beguile that blundering knight /into comical questing hexhood." When Nivene mysteriously disappears, our hero embarks upon a great rescue - a magical, timeless journey into the Dark Wood, not on the back of a noble steed but behind the wheel of a banged-up black pickup truck. The Wood is full of dangers: poisoned lakes, mechanical animals, reeking factories, fundamentalist elders, and screeching, sexy witches who broadcast a mad and maddening music from their secret shacks. If you squint, it all looks uncomfortably like today's America.



"Clark certainly casts a spell," writes Barbara Hoffert in the San Francisco Chronicle. "His work can be seen as a social fable targeting the mind-numbing incantations of contemporary society; as a heroic quest for love and purification; as a cautionary tale about political control; as a treatise on ecological disaster; as an ironic science-fiction send-up; and as a meditation on free will - all told in the language of a skilled poet." The final effect is "haunting . . . expansive . . . startling."