John Mort
Autore di Christian Fiction: A Guide to the Genre
Opere di John Mort
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First things first: every one of these stories is first class fiction, and I loved 'em all. It is such a pity that short story collections are such a hard sell in the book industry, because these stories are WORTH READING and WORTH YOUR TIME!
I first discovered John Mort's work about five years ago when I picked up a used copy of his first novel, SOLDIER IN PARADISE (SMU Press, 1999). Although I was late in finding it, I was blown away by the book. Since then I've read a couple more Mort books (GOAT BOY OF THE OZARKS and THE ILLEGAL), both very good. And now I've read the latest, DOWN ALONG THE PINEY: OZARKS STORIES (his fourth short story collection), and, as I've already indicated, every story in it is simply superb, and I was hooked from the first page. "Pitchblende" gives us "the Colonel," a crazed Korean War veteran, bulldozing a Missouri mountain top in a futile search for uranium while his family disintegrates around him. The story's narrator is his son, Michael, looking back years later, at memories of shooting rats at the local landfill, his mother going back to school and gradually drifting away, and his own wonder and puzzlement at having survived his tour in Vietnam, where several of his high school classmates died -
"I was a warrant officer. I was a pilot, and twice I was shot down. Who knows why, but the bullets flew all around me, and i was never touched."
And then there is "The Hog Whisperer," in which Mort gives us Carrie Kreider, an autistic "backward, and unusually large, country girl," who "was gifted, it turned out," and won a full scholarship to Kansas State, where her master's thesis was "on how containment hog operations could be more humane." A huge Texas farm conglomerate hires her to research how to "make hog s**t smell sweet." There's more, of course, as Carrie tries to negotiate the pitfalls of men's cruelty and the mysteries of falling in love. It's simply a lovely little story in which Mort might have been channeling the inner life of Temple Grandin.
"Red Rock Valley" makes a sharp turn into the inner life of a lonely homosexual, his partner long gone, succumbed to AIDS, as he returns home, where his father is dying. Robert 'Killer' Coogan is the emotionally damaged veteran in "Behind Enemy Lines," living on a river island in an old school bus with a wolf as his only companion. Bad teeth force him out of his isolation to a VA hospital, where he discovers, as one of his companions calls it, "Money for nothing … Good as it gets."
"The Book Club" explores the lives of a sect of women outcasts, ex-cons, unfit mothers and misfits, with murmurs of Shirley Jackson's classic story, "The Lottery." And "Mariposa" gives us an intimate look into the tough times of a migrant worker family, forced to return to Mexico, as seen through the eyes of a teen daughter, U.S. born, who cannot adjust.
But of the thirteen stories presented here, the centerpiece - and the longest, at fifty pages - is unquestionably "Take the Man Out and Shoot Him," a look inside a Jim Jones-like, utopian, wilderness Ozarks community of assorted evangelicals, militant survivalists, crazies and hangers-on founded by a retired army sergeant known only as "Top." The toxic mix of guns, religion and fanatacism come to a boil and erupt in murder and the stalking of a political candidate with a shady, criminal past. This is a story that has immediate relevance in our country's current atmosphere of hate and division. Mort has peopled it with very believable and human characters, especially young Birdy Blevins, a former drug addict 'rescued' by Top, who becomes, first, an emaciated Christ-figure in a Passion Play tableau put on for tourists in the New Jerusalem settlement, and, finally, the cop-killing "Jesus Boy," the object of an interstate man-hunt.
John Mort is at the top of his game with these latest stories. I'll say it again. I loved every one of them. My very highest recommendation.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (altro)
I first discovered John Mort's work about five years ago when I picked up a used copy of his first novel, SOLDIER IN PARADISE (SMU Press, 1999). Although I was late in finding it, I was blown away by the book. Since then I've read a couple more Mort books (GOAT BOY OF THE OZARKS and THE ILLEGAL), both very good. And now I've read the latest, DOWN ALONG THE PINEY: OZARKS STORIES (his fourth short story collection), and, as I've already indicated, every story in it is simply superb, and I was hooked from the first page. "Pitchblende" gives us "the Colonel," a crazed Korean War veteran, bulldozing a Missouri mountain top in a futile search for uranium while his family disintegrates around him. The story's narrator is his son, Michael, looking back years later, at memories of shooting rats at the local landfill, his mother going back to school and gradually drifting away, and his own wonder and puzzlement at having survived his tour in Vietnam, where several of his high school classmates died -
"I was a warrant officer. I was a pilot, and twice I was shot down. Who knows why, but the bullets flew all around me, and i was never touched."
And then there is "The Hog Whisperer," in which Mort gives us Carrie Kreider, an autistic "backward, and unusually large, country girl," who "was gifted, it turned out," and won a full scholarship to Kansas State, where her master's thesis was "on how containment hog operations could be more humane." A huge Texas farm conglomerate hires her to research how to "make hog s**t smell sweet." There's more, of course, as Carrie tries to negotiate the pitfalls of men's cruelty and the mysteries of falling in love. It's simply a lovely little story in which Mort might have been channeling the inner life of Temple Grandin.
"Red Rock Valley" makes a sharp turn into the inner life of a lonely homosexual, his partner long gone, succumbed to AIDS, as he returns home, where his father is dying. Robert 'Killer' Coogan is the emotionally damaged veteran in "Behind Enemy Lines," living on a river island in an old school bus with a wolf as his only companion. Bad teeth force him out of his isolation to a VA hospital, where he discovers, as one of his companions calls it, "Money for nothing … Good as it gets."
"The Book Club" explores the lives of a sect of women outcasts, ex-cons, unfit mothers and misfits, with murmurs of Shirley Jackson's classic story, "The Lottery." And "Mariposa" gives us an intimate look into the tough times of a migrant worker family, forced to return to Mexico, as seen through the eyes of a teen daughter, U.S. born, who cannot adjust.
But of the thirteen stories presented here, the centerpiece - and the longest, at fifty pages - is unquestionably "Take the Man Out and Shoot Him," a look inside a Jim Jones-like, utopian, wilderness Ozarks community of assorted evangelicals, militant survivalists, crazies and hangers-on founded by a retired army sergeant known only as "Top." The toxic mix of guns, religion and fanatacism come to a boil and erupt in murder and the stalking of a political candidate with a shady, criminal past. This is a story that has immediate relevance in our country's current atmosphere of hate and division. Mort has peopled it with very believable and human characters, especially young Birdy Blevins, a former drug addict 'rescued' by Top, who becomes, first, an emaciated Christ-figure in a Passion Play tableau put on for tourists in the New Jerusalem settlement, and, finally, the cop-killing "Jesus Boy," the object of an interstate man-hunt.
John Mort is at the top of his game with these latest stories. I'll say it again. I loved every one of them. My very highest recommendation.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (altro)
GOAT BOY OF THE OZARKS is the third John Mort novel I have read, all in just the past several months. I suspect that this story of an orphaned boy trying to find his place in the Ozark hills during the height of the Vietnam war is one close to the heart of its author, a Missouri boy himself who knows about the tedious work of harvesting walnuts to sell at a marginal profit and constantly scrabbling for a living in a region that was up against it economically in those years when corporate farming was wiping out all the smaller family farms. Mort even names Tyson's here as one of the major villains that undercut all the smaller chicken farmers of the time. (Mort's newest novel, THE ILLEGAL, also reflected important moral and social issues of the time.)
John Mort's unlikely yet believable - and likeable - hero here is 16 year-old Johnny Bell, recently returned from Texas to the "home place" with his alcoholic grandfather, who quickly "flames out," leaving Johnny to his own devices. Placed in the foster care of the Ogletree family, chicken farmers, Johnny struggles to figure out his proper place, aided by a kind teacher (possibly another alcoholic), a sympathetic sheriff and a hypocritical ambitious preacher. Throw in some sexual awakening scenes with an Ogletree daughter and a beautiful but fickle high school cheerleader and you've got a coming of age tale, with fast cars, drinking and even death.
The book gets its title from a play written by Johnny's teacher, a corny hillbilly melodrama concocted to divert and entertain the northern tourists en route to nearby Branson. Johnny is perfect for the part, since he does indeed have a connection to a small herd of goats, particularly one nanny rescued from the wild and named La, for a character from a Tarzan novel. In fact something about the title and Johnny and La kept reminding me of another classic southern novel I read as a boy, John Fox Jr's THE LITTLE SHEPHERD OF KINGDOM COME. Perhaps not such a bad comparison, as Fox's novel featured the American Civil War and Mort's narrative features the Vietnam War lurking ominously in the background. The sheriff is a returned veteran of Vietnam, as is Max Ogletree, both characters for which Johnny shows a guarded admiration.
Bottom line: this is a well-written story which moves you right along, wondering how John Bell's going to make out; how he will make sense out of his lfie. In some respects it reads like a Young Adult novel, but with darker undertones (particularly its treatment of the "born again" Oral Roberts-type Christianity depicted in the hill country). It would also be a perfect book to read just before reading Mort's excellent award-winning novel of Vietnam, SOLDIER IN PARADISE. In any case, it's an entertaining and thought-provoking piece of work. I enjoyed it.… (altro)
John Mort's unlikely yet believable - and likeable - hero here is 16 year-old Johnny Bell, recently returned from Texas to the "home place" with his alcoholic grandfather, who quickly "flames out," leaving Johnny to his own devices. Placed in the foster care of the Ogletree family, chicken farmers, Johnny struggles to figure out his proper place, aided by a kind teacher (possibly another alcoholic), a sympathetic sheriff and a hypocritical ambitious preacher. Throw in some sexual awakening scenes with an Ogletree daughter and a beautiful but fickle high school cheerleader and you've got a coming of age tale, with fast cars, drinking and even death.
The book gets its title from a play written by Johnny's teacher, a corny hillbilly melodrama concocted to divert and entertain the northern tourists en route to nearby Branson. Johnny is perfect for the part, since he does indeed have a connection to a small herd of goats, particularly one nanny rescued from the wild and named La, for a character from a Tarzan novel. In fact something about the title and Johnny and La kept reminding me of another classic southern novel I read as a boy, John Fox Jr's THE LITTLE SHEPHERD OF KINGDOM COME. Perhaps not such a bad comparison, as Fox's novel featured the American Civil War and Mort's narrative features the Vietnam War lurking ominously in the background. The sheriff is a returned veteran of Vietnam, as is Max Ogletree, both characters for which Johnny shows a guarded admiration.
Bottom line: this is a well-written story which moves you right along, wondering how John Bell's going to make out; how he will make sense out of his lfie. In some respects it reads like a Young Adult novel, but with darker undertones (particularly its treatment of the "born again" Oral Roberts-type Christianity depicted in the hill country). It would also be a perfect book to read just before reading Mort's excellent award-winning novel of Vietnam, SOLDIER IN PARADISE. In any case, it's an entertaining and thought-provoking piece of work. I enjoyed it.… (altro)
I first 'discovered' John Mort's writing only recently when I read - and 'savored' - his fine novel of the Vietnam war, SOLDIER IN PARADISE (1999). His latest novel, THE ILLEGAL, is distinctly different from that one, less autobiographical and more the product of voluminous reading and painstaking research. The result is a fascinating, if at times perhaps a bit fanciful, look at what it might be like to be an "illegal" in today's America. Mort's protagonist, an honorable young Mexican army officer named Mario Oliveros, becomes that old cliché, a "wetback," when he is pressured by a corrupt superior into an illicit drug deal, a transaction that goes suddenly south, forcing him to swim north across the Rio Grande where he takes up the shadow-life of an "indocumentado," - an illegal.
A man without a country, indeed without even an identity of his own, but with many useful skills combined with a strong work ethic, Mario works his way over the next few years slowly up across Texas with pick-up shady jobs in San Angelo and Dallas. His employments are many and varied, some legal, some not. He works in a scrap metal yard, then as a contractor renovating houses in Dallas for a calculating wealthy widow, disciple and contributor to a megachurch that preaches, generally, that it's okay to be rich and to pray for a new car or a mcmansion. At the same time he is an unwilling accomplice to some major larcenies, one of which results in some unintentional collateral loss of life. Mario flees the city, ending up deep in the desert of the Texas Panhandle where he becomes maintenance foreman at a corporate hog farm where some very questionable experiments mixing human DNA into pig breeding is going on. (The scientist who runs these experiments is nicknamed FrankenCarl.)
Along the way Mario is involved in a very passionate if doomed love affair with Rosa, a beautiful young PoliSci grad student. He also changes his name to Raul Zamora, when he inherits the green card and driver's license from a friend killed in a grisly construction accident. Mario's continuing dream throughout these dark, picaresque adventures is a simple one, to save enough money to buy some land and have his own farm where he can grow vegetables. At the hog farm he meets Carrie, a mannish awkward young scientist who is smitten with him. Mario, his affair with the fiery Rosa behind him, gradually falls in "like" with Carrie, and, when the hog farm closes down, travels further north to Kansas with her, still in search of his dream.
The fact is there is so much going on in this book that it is nearly impossible to adequately summarize it. Author Mort has been a librarian in the southwest for much of his life, and it shows. Not only does his narrative reflect a keen awareness of the social injustices of America's "border wars" and illegal immigrants, it also gets into environmental issues (especially the heedless exploiting of our country's finite water supply) and the death of small towns and communities resulting from the rise of the big box stores like Walmart, which Mort refers to as "America's true church." He also gives some sidebar attention to a small group of Mexican revolutionaries known as "Cibolistas" - after the mythical Cibola, a southwestern Shangri-La.
Mort's librarian background also comes through in the number of times libraries play a part in the narrative itself. Mario uses libraries every place he travels, both as a refuge from heat and/or homelessness, and as a repository of useful, practical knowledge. If there is a weakness at all in THE ILLEGAL it is this device, as I often found myself wondering whether a struggling illegal immigrant would actually spend that much time in that many libraries in his wanderings. But then Mort's bilingual Mario was an unusually educated, inquisitive and ambitious sort, which 'forces' the issue, I suppose, so the library device does work.
Bottom line: this is a fascinating and entertaining tale which moves quickly and seamlessly along, as well a thought-provoking look at a number of important issues that figure prominently in today's world. John Mort knows his stuff and tells a good story. Highly recommended.… (altro)
A man without a country, indeed without even an identity of his own, but with many useful skills combined with a strong work ethic, Mario works his way over the next few years slowly up across Texas with pick-up shady jobs in San Angelo and Dallas. His employments are many and varied, some legal, some not. He works in a scrap metal yard, then as a contractor renovating houses in Dallas for a calculating wealthy widow, disciple and contributor to a megachurch that preaches, generally, that it's okay to be rich and to pray for a new car or a mcmansion. At the same time he is an unwilling accomplice to some major larcenies, one of which results in some unintentional collateral loss of life. Mario flees the city, ending up deep in the desert of the Texas Panhandle where he becomes maintenance foreman at a corporate hog farm where some very questionable experiments mixing human DNA into pig breeding is going on. (The scientist who runs these experiments is nicknamed FrankenCarl.)
Along the way Mario is involved in a very passionate if doomed love affair with Rosa, a beautiful young PoliSci grad student. He also changes his name to Raul Zamora, when he inherits the green card and driver's license from a friend killed in a grisly construction accident. Mario's continuing dream throughout these dark, picaresque adventures is a simple one, to save enough money to buy some land and have his own farm where he can grow vegetables. At the hog farm he meets Carrie, a mannish awkward young scientist who is smitten with him. Mario, his affair with the fiery Rosa behind him, gradually falls in "like" with Carrie, and, when the hog farm closes down, travels further north to Kansas with her, still in search of his dream.
The fact is there is so much going on in this book that it is nearly impossible to adequately summarize it. Author Mort has been a librarian in the southwest for much of his life, and it shows. Not only does his narrative reflect a keen awareness of the social injustices of America's "border wars" and illegal immigrants, it also gets into environmental issues (especially the heedless exploiting of our country's finite water supply) and the death of small towns and communities resulting from the rise of the big box stores like Walmart, which Mort refers to as "America's true church." He also gives some sidebar attention to a small group of Mexican revolutionaries known as "Cibolistas" - after the mythical Cibola, a southwestern Shangri-La.
Mort's librarian background also comes through in the number of times libraries play a part in the narrative itself. Mario uses libraries every place he travels, both as a refuge from heat and/or homelessness, and as a repository of useful, practical knowledge. If there is a weakness at all in THE ILLEGAL it is this device, as I often found myself wondering whether a struggling illegal immigrant would actually spend that much time in that many libraries in his wanderings. But then Mort's bilingual Mario was an unusually educated, inquisitive and ambitious sort, which 'forces' the issue, I suppose, so the library device does work.
Bottom line: this is a fascinating and entertaining tale which moves quickly and seamlessly along, as well a thought-provoking look at a number of important issues that figure prominently in today's world. John Mort knows his stuff and tells a good story. Highly recommended.… (altro)
Premi e riconoscimenti
Statistiche
- Opere
- 10
- Utenti
- 40
- Popolarità
- #370,100
- Voto
- 4.1
- Recensioni
- 5
- ISBN
- 18
- Lingue
- 1
Yeah, i suppose i have weird taste in books, but to anyone who loved westerns - books or movies - READ THE HIGH COUNTRY is a rare treasure. I loved it. Thank you, Mr Mort.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (altro)