<p>Fiction. Brutality, defeat, loneliness, and mournful longing haunt and ignite Finn's collection with an assembly of unforgettable characters confronted by life-changing crises that force them to make impossible choices. Two brothers try to survive their father's unexpected death by protecting their widowed mother from a drunken sexual vulture at a cousin's wedding reception; the last orphan in an aging foster mother's house tries to escape the abusive homophobia he faces in a rigidly-masculine Catholic high school; and a former quarry trucker, after thirty years in prison for murdering his sister's rapist, is hired as a bouncer by a Greek immigrant who tries to save his failing restaurant by transforming it into a nightclub of seductive belly dancers. Set in the gritty Rustbelt of Joliet, Illinois during the early 1980s, its rickety skyline of smokestacks, steeples, and rotting telephone poles, its abandoned houses, basements, quarries, and rail yards, Finn's fictional world is breathtakingly constructed with prose that is both lush and crisp, imagistic, deeply evocative, and instantly memorable.</p>

From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet

Literature & Fiction

Finn, Patrick Michael

United States

Black Lawrence Press

<p>The desert spares no souls.\nSet in the scorched and unforgiving deserts of the American Southwest, A Place for Snakes to Breed follows Weldon Holt’s desperate search for his daughter Tammy, who is lost in the vicious landscape of interstate truck stop prostitution and its nightworlds “where the fruit of human trade is harvested by razor blades and cheap pistols.”\nWeldon Holt knows these brutal roadways all too well. As an over-the-road truck driver he was once ruined by liquor and methedrine, and he vanished from his daughter’s life. After a brief reconnection some fifteen years later, his daughter vanishes from his. Now, returning to the same roads that nearly killed him, Weldon must protect the sobriety he’s maintained for over a decade as Tammy does her best to lay her own life to ruin. The violence of temptation does battle with Weldon’s urgency to find and save Tammy at every mile marker he passes.\nThe character of time is devoured as Tammy descends into her journey of hellish self-destruction and agony, where the threat of death thrums in every motel room she visits and in every hitchhiked ride she takes. Her body and spirit deteriorate in the pollution of alcohol and cheap stimulants as she escapes into a vaporous version of herself where no real self remains.\nTold with taut, vivid, and hallucinatory prose, A Place for Snakes to Breed explores the darkest expanses of human despair peopled by unforgettable characters who live and breathe on the page with complexity and emotional depth as they struggle to liberate themselves from the interstate’s pythonic grasp.\nPraise for A PLACE FOR SNAKES TO BREED:\n“Finn writes with the precision and eloquence of Cormac McCarthy, an understanding of what Jack London called ‘the submerged tenth,’ and the brutality of Nelson Algren and David Goodis. A Place for Snakes to Breed is a novel that will be studied by students and scholars, and serve as a model of how a book should be written for writers.” —Eric Miles Williamson, author of East Bay Grease and Welcome to Oakland\n“Finn’s sinewy sentences whose movements you will not predict (and which you will read several times to savor and to try to piece out how he got there) turns A Place for Snakes to Breed into much more than a story about a troubled youth on a journey through the underworld. This is the world of a gifted writer who knows that the impoverished, the defective, and the hopeless is as complex as that of the upper-class characters that populate so much best-selling drivel.” —Ron Cooper, author of Purple Jesusand All My Sins Remembered</p>

A Place for Snakes to Breed

Down & Out Books

Poetry. "Patrick Michael Finn has written a fierce and frightening, often gorgeously described, swirling, pulsing, sweating runaway car crash of a novella that reminded me of the darker works of Denis Johnson and Hubert Selby. A MARTYR FOR SUZY KOSASOVICH is an unsparing look at the other side of the American dream; the collective rage that passes for friendship in some corners. While Finn's characters are often short-sighted and mean-spirited, his luminous writing and knack for telling detail makes their story relevant and unforgettable"--Michael Jamie-Becerra.

A Martyr for Suzy Kosasovich (Imagination, 15)

Literary

Cleveland State U Poetry Center

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