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The Town That Forgot How to Breathe: A Novel

Average customer rating:

Totally bizarre but fun!
The review that forgot to lie
Message Without a Cause (or Clue)
Tedious
The Author Who Almost Forgot How To Write . . .

The Town That Forgot How to Breathe: A Novel
Kenneth J. Harvey
Manufacturer: Picador
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0312424809
Release Date: 2006-08-22

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With no more cod to fish, Bareneed, the setting of Kenneth J. Harvey's powerfully eerie The Town That Forgot How to Breathe, has become another Newfoundland outport village on the wane. As one character laments, "Bareneed, once a lively and warm place, now stank of drabness and heartbreak." It's not much of a magnet for tourists, but it has attracted two visitors for the summer: a fisheries officer and his young daughter. Deeply pained by the recent break-up of his marriage, Joseph fails to notice the more curious aspects of the town. It takes him a while to hear about the townsfolk who've been dropping dead for no apparent reason. He's also slow to realize that his daughter Robin's new playmate is the ghost of a drowned girl. When he and Robin find an "exceptionally ugly" sculpin at the end of their fishing line, Joseph again tries to stay calm. But then he takes a closer look at his catch. "Feeling his fingers turn warm while he tried to disengage the hook," Harvey writes, "Joseph whisked them away. Flesh-coloured fluid seeped from the sculpin's wide mouth. A solid object began edging out as he wiped his fingers on his pants--a flesh-coloured sculpted orb, topped with something that resembled hair, matted in mucousy clumps." The porcelain doll's head that emerges from the fish is one in a series of unsettling sights in Harvey's book. As more and more objects are expelled from the sea, Bareneed's most painful secrets come to the surface.

By setting his story in this desolate Atlantic locale, Harvey seeks to do more than add regional flavour to a Stephen King-style tale of an ordinary community plagued by inexplicable events. Instead, the terrors that Harvey describes are rooted in very real psychological and societal traumas. What makes The Town That Forgot How to Breathe so cunning is the way Harvey uses the horror genre as the basis for a provocative defence of Newfoundland's imperiled cultural traditions. Even though his ornate prose style can sometimes get waterlogged in the scenes between the shocks, Harvey has created a book that is as compelling as it is unique. --Jason Anderson

Book Description

Something strange is happening in the seaside town of Bareneed. Mythical creatures are being pulled from the sea, perfectly preserved corpses of long-lost villagers are washing up on the shore, and residents of the town are suddenly overcome by a mysterious illness that is making them forget how to breathe.

A page-turning gothic thriller reminiscent of H. P. Lovecraft, The Town That Forgot How to Breathe is "a novel of dazzling ambition and strange, haunting loveliness. . . . An absolute triumph of the storyteller's art" (Joseph O'Connor, author of Star of the Sea).

Customer Reviews:

Totally bizarre but fun!.......2007-04-26

At times I really felt that I was a part of "The Town that Forgot How to Breathe". Very descriptive. All the characters, even the minor ones were very well developed. There were some parts where I got a little confused and felt the author didn't describe the scene well enough but overall a very interesting read. The "horror" is minimal. This is not a gore fest or even that scary. It's kind of hard to describe because I have never read anything else like it!

The review that forgot to lie.......2006-11-30

This book took me a long time to finish, almost a month, I think. It is slow paced and tends to spin off as if they took a lot of filler from other books that was edited out and crammed them in here.
Spinning towards a vapid, hippie ending, it does nothing to save itself from being God awful. Tragically, I think this was a best seller.

D.

Message Without a Cause (or Clue).......2006-10-22

Reviews from places like The Detroit Free Press, Bookpage, The San Francisco Chronicle, and many others heap praise on this novel, calling it "meticulously created", "haunting, poetic, funny, and moving", "a thoughtful piece of literary horror." I hate to be the contrarian here, but I call it simply "goofy" - a pretentious bombast of confused messages and rambling prose that never manages to get to the point and is more (unintentionally) funny than scary.

Bareneed, Newfoundland, is an old fishing town in decline following the banning of cod fishing and the closing of the local fish factory. Soon after Joseph Blackwood and his young daughter show up, renting a home for a summer vacation in the picturesque coastal town, strange things start happening. Local residents, forgetting how to breathe - literally - while at the same time becoming violent and forgetting who they are - start filling up the local hospital. Then bodies - some apparently centuries old but perfectly intact - start bobbing up to the surface of the bay. Strange and mythical sea creatures romp in the surf, while those locals still breathing normally seem to spend most of their time drawing pictures, spouting New Age psycho-babble, or breaking out in seafaring folk songs. The respiratory-challenged, all tubed-up in ICU, were much less annoying than those Bareneed residents still able to function "normally". But this was the part of the book that was discernable. The rest - a tedious concoction of man's connection with the sea, with family, with death, spirits, amber lights, fish, mermaids and the Canadian armed forces - is less clear, if that is possible.

In summary, it seems that author Kenneth Harvey was trying to be Steven King - but Steven King with some important, moral message. He failed on both counts - even King's sub par "Cell" is a classic literature by comparison. "The Town that Forgot How to Breathe" is simply all wet - save your time and money and wait for the next port.

Tedious.......2006-09-11

Reading this book was as tedious as running a mile in chest-deep water. Comparisons to King and Proulx are ridiculous. King, at least, keeps his stories humming while Proulx's writing is minimalist brilliance. Harvey's story is waterlogged and interminable, leaking page-bloating, tangential backstories every ten pages and peopled with annoying, boring characters. As for his style, it's bloated, taxing and sodden, the occasional surreal touch nothwithstanding. (Sure, an albino shark barfing up a human head is startling, but it, like so much of this novel, is ultimately meaningless.) Every time his character, Miss Laracy, opens her toothless mouth (how many times do we need a description of her pink, shiny gums?) and chatters endlessly in her apostrophe-riddled, irksomely rendered Newfoundland dialect, I got so weary I could barely hold the book up in my hands. Worse, while Harvey's story is intrigueing enough to keep you reading, his climax and resolution are so uneventful and silly and, well, boring, that I actually tossed the book aside after (finally!) finishing the last page. Four hundred and seventy-one pages of over-plotted, over-written monotonous drivel. Pure tedium.

The Author Who Almost Forgot How To Write . . ........2006-09-10

I had great hopes for this book. The title was intriguing; the premise--- original. But I think the writer lost his way . . . about 3 quarters into the book.

The prose itself is wonderfully wrought and the images described are unforgettably vivid. Some standouts is the description of the child ghost: Jessica who haunted her mother and freely interacted with a living child. The fact that she was drowned figures greatly in how she is seen. And the writing is so crystal-clear that I could practically smell her . . . I imagined sea urchins, snails and rotting Sargasso seaweed. The scene where she manifested her deterioration in the sea after death was particularly dreadful! In a Classic Horror --- sort of way. (This is a compliment.)

Kenneth Harvey is gifted. For me, there is no doubt. His character development , most evident in characters who had the Sight: Tom Quilty, an artist savant, Miss Laracy and Robin--- was outstanding. And his attention to detail in the physical world in this book . . . is beyond the painful ability of most writers. His writing is just too beautiful for words.

But I think he couldn't figure out how to write the resolution of his tale? I am still puzzled as to the source of the villagers' illness. And how the illness affected their environment. I read how they appeared to be cured but it seemed incomplete somehow. It was unsatisfying. It felt as if the author was just trying to close the book. The big event at the end of the book just seemed contrived. A device to finish the story. A unruly knot to close the thread

I will read the writer's next book. In hope that his next tale's denouement will improve. Because the other elements of his writing skills are top-notch!! 3 and a Half Stars for allowing me the pleasure of reading this book at least 3 quarters of the way.

Average customer rating:

The Town That Forgot How to Breathe
Kenneth J. Harvey
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OTCDAM

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