a captivating read | Winged Creatures: A Novel

a beautifully-woven tapestry of loss | Winged Creatures: A Novel | Roy Freirich

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	• Winged Creatures: A Novel Roy Freirich St. Martin's Griffin, 2008 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 14 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Straight to the heart of it

In the past few decades, America has seen the rise of a strange phenomenon: the random shooting. Every time a shooting happens, the media shows up, records the pain and shock in front of them, and then leave, as if that were all of the story there was to tell. So much of our culture focuses on the actual event; every minute, tiny detail is taken and replayed over and over on our television screens. Less frequently we study the time leading up to the tragedy, magnifying motives and reasons. While works concerning this are certainly necessary, in Winged Creatures, we have a new perspective entirely. This book shows us what happens when America moves on, and the victims are left alone with their thoughts.

Anne, whose father was killed, becomes both a zealot and a martyr to his memory. Her friend Jimmy is struck completely mute from fear of Anne, and the truth of what happened to her father. Dependable family man Charlie survives a scraped bullet wound to the head and decides that he is lucky--lucky enough to gain a better life for his wife and daughter by betting all of their savings in a Las Vegas casino. Carla slowly disconnects from what she loves most in the world, and becomes lost in an escapist fantasy involving Laraby, the doctor who failed to save Anne's father's life, and who has now developed an obsessive complex with saving the "sick".

It's a very dark book, as the subject matter calls for, but is handled with a precision and care that could almost be described as loving-- each character is delicately, compassionately displayed, and yet their progressing sicknesses are raw and candid. Real, I think would be the word to describe this story. This book is real.

I would recommend it to any survivor of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, as it rings absolutely true. Anyone should read it, though, to be honest. I haven't read a book this intimate, touching, or poignant in a very long time. It teaches compassion. It does so beautifully.

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a captivating read

Roy Freirich introduces the reader to a divergent group of characters linked by a shared traumatic event. The interweaving of these characters stories, both externally and internally, is real and raw and deeply touching. It's as if you're living inside each characters' head as they traverse their individual journey to regain their balance and make sense of their altered world view. It's a captivating, intimate read - my favorite sort of stories.

a beautifully-woven tapestry of loss

What's most stunning about this novel is the way Freirich gets inside of each of his varied characters as each one bends -- or even breaks -- under the weight of their shared tragedy. His prose is always fluid and elegant, even as it shifts between the characters' many distinct points of view. The novel does skip around a lot -- between characters and through time, as the details of the shooting are gradually revealed -- but it does so in such a deliberate and skillful way that it feels like this is the only way this story could have been told. It builds steadily to an ending that's both surprising and inevitable. In short, this is a masterful first novel. I can't wait to see what else Freirich has in store for us.

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With every step you take

Writers are not like you and I. They see things in our every day existence that the rest of us just overlook. Is that a door handle that you are reaching for to go into the next room? No, rather it is a portal that leads you into a world of memories and emotions. Get out of your car, close the door behind you, and with every step you take the flow of consciousness relives a past moment, reflects on a possession, undoes an injustice. What Mr. Frierich has done is to peel back the sedimentary layers of our selves, graph out the dig site, and catalog the key components of an experience that shakes us to our foundations. And in observing ourselves under extreme conditions we reveal our most basic survival skills, our coping mechanisms, our strengths and weaknesses. We reveal what makes us human.

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Beautiful read, loved it!!

This is an amazing novel. The language is fluid and expressive. It felt like it wasn't authored at all, as though I was witnessing a natural unfolding of character, each slowly spinning out of control by their now tainted souls after witnessing 1st hand the senseless murder-spree of a public massacre -- which seems to be part of our Modern-American society. It beautifully plunges into the darkness of their souls, growing darker with every page turn. It masterfully intertwined the threads of these people's lives with perfectly placed flashbacks that piecemealed fragments of the event that began the whole bloody thing. And I really enjoyed the ending which I won't give away, but was the only real way to end it. Anyone who has suffered a traumatic event wonders: "What if I did... one thing differently that morning?" This is a beautiful piece of story-telling. And masterfully done.

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Shots ring out in a local fast food restaurant. Teenager Anne Hagen and her best friend Jimmy hide under a table, watching a suicidal gunman randomly murder her father and others. Winged Creatures tells the stories of the survivors. . .

Struggling to understand her father's death, Anne develops a religious hysteria. Jimmy becomes mute, protecting a secret that he and Anne share until it nearly destroys him and his already fractured family. Grazed by a bullet, driving instructor Charlie becomes obsessed with pressing his luck at a casino. By dangerous degrees, restaurant cashier Carla loses her ability to care for herself and her infant son. Dr. Laraby, an ER physician who failed to revive the shooting victims, turns to his wife as someone to ?save,? while psychologist Ron Abler tries to counsel the witnesses, but meets suspicion and resistance.

Winged Creatures intimately depicts the inner lives of five people driven by secret torments and dangerous compulsions, in flight from their own memories and dreams, as they struggle to regain their trust in the ordinary world.

ROY FREIRICH is a screenwriter and songwriter living in Malibu, California. Winged Creatures is his first novel.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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