Hearts are Pumpers, Diamonds are Sparklers, Spades are diggers, Clubs are Puppytoes,
Squire Babcock came to Austin Peay State University last night to read from his debute novel the King of Gaheena, which was published by Mote Books in 2008.
Squire is an eloquent, with a voice that is as smooth as the Kentucky Bourbon his home state is famous for, His writing style is much the same. Having the opportunity to hear him read from his work last night set forever the voice of that internal narrator for this book that we all hear in our heads when we read.
“The novel is set in Louisville, Ky., and in a fictional town called Gaheena, Ark.,” Babcock said. In the pre-event press release he laid out the course he would follow, “The novel is at times darkly dramatic and, I hope, funny at times, and I plan to read some dramatic scenes from both Kentucky and Arkansas and leaven them with some scenes that provide a little comic relief. In fact, that’s mostly how I see life on this planet, as darkly dramatic narratives leavened (thank God) with occasional comic relief.”
The event was sponsored by the Austin Peay State University Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts and was hosted by the APSU English Department. Creative Writing Professor Barry Kitterman gave the introduction. He described the novel during his introduction as a “Wild Ride”. Barry described Squire’s writing by saying “It’s probably no coincidence that his publisher also publishes Silas House and a number of other fine writers in the region, writers with a strong sense of place, in this case both rural Arkansas and Louisville, Ky. He’s a writer who can tell a compelling story and get at the big issues at the same time.”
Squire Babcock admits that for much of his early life, he was an aimless, drifting soul. The low point came after an arrest for possession of heroin, but for years afterward, he moved from job to job, working as a ballroom dance instructor, a farm hand, a hunting guide, a pool table repair mechanic, carpenter, a free-lance journalist, a small business owner and blues drummer. “Young and foolish is the most benign characterization of my youth.” he joked during the reading.
During the reading, the audience sat with rapt attention on their faces as they were regaled with a narrative on Calvin Turtle’s rise from boyhood to the funeral of his parents. I bought a copy of the book after the reading, and I am looking forward to making the time to read the rest of it!
About the Book
Calvin Turtle, a 20-year-old rich kid from Louisville has used a difficult card game called Klondike as his life’s moral and providential touchstone. This version of Solitaire becomes the equivalent of a religion for Calvin, and within it he interprets symbolic guidance and pointed judgments of his character. An emotional paralysis that traps Calvin between the passivity of childhood and the decisiveness of manhood enables Klondike to produce defining motifs for his fate.
During the six months following the fiery Fourth of July death of his parents in a car wreck (for which he is blamed), the protagonist, a nearly friendless loner, must learn to manage both his family business (the Turtle Playing Card Company) and his father’s vast hunting preserve in Gaheena, Arkansas. All the while, he is forced to fight charges that he killed his parents.
Calvin’s internal grappling to unlock secrets of good, evil and indifference is made manifest with a literal struggle in a snaky quagmire as he battles to save himself from Gaheen’s “king,” a man name Karl who epitomizes two qualities that captivate Calvin’s fear and his admiration: terror and raw guiltless power.
A series of near-mythical scenes set in rural Arkansas swampland intersects with a string of cosmopolitan vignettes that Babcock moves the reader deftly through antithetical emotional landscapes that mirror the main character’s interior geography to reflect the very heart of a troubled American generation.
Initially at odds with his own magnetic poles, Calvin finds through his struggles that discordant forces ultimately come to rest at counterbalance. This causes Calvin, and the reader, to question the very notion of what it means to be “king.”
Infused with its wealth of symbolism, Babcock’s novel is a compelling tale that contrasts normalcy, whatever that may be, against paradoxes revealed in nature and humanity. From the opening chapter to the final deal of the cards, The King of Gaheena is an odyssey of love, lust, seduction and confusion … shot through with stout doses of confrontation and tragedy, the hunter and the hunted, violence and wonder, longing and learning, recovery and redemption.
Praise for The King of Gaheena
“Squire Babcock’s The King of Gaheena is a fascinating and complex novel which illuminates the most fundamental of human concerns: how to assess out purpose in the world and control our destiny. The characters are rich and vivd, and the prose is lush and evocative. Babcock is a splendid novelist who deserves a wide audience.” – Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
“The King of Gaheena is that rare thing: an absolutely original work that is by turns laugh-out-loud funny on one page and surprisingly moving on the next. Squire Babcock has created a living, breating character in Calvin, whom I won’t soon forget. He has also given us a fully imagined world popluated by plenty of other memorable characters who are as endearing and as upsetting as your own family or neighbors. This novel is a wild ride, and I enjoyed everyminute of it.” – Silas House, author of Clay’s Quilt and A Parchment of Leaves
“Squire Babcock’s range is amazing. Not only does he write gorgeously about the country clubs of the Blugrass and the brambles of the Arkansas swampgrass, but he elegantly shreds the thin veneer of civility that separates the two. His tale of discovery, peppered with shock and surprise, should come with a warning: Bewar. Even the water is electric with sin and passion. The King of Gaheena will be hard to put down.” – Lynn Pruett, author of Ruby River
“The King of Gaheena beautifully conjures the wild Arkansas landscape as the vast contested territory of family and individual identity. For 20-year-old Calvin Turtle, it is part of an inhertance freighted with entitlement and grief, violence and blind need, and surprising moments of wonder. Squire Babcock’s compelling new novel brings the linked worlds of Gaheena and society Louisville vividly to life as Calvin reckons with irretrievable loss, misuses of power, and vexed legacy of his father, to claim a life of his own.” – Nancy Reisman, author of The First Desire and House Fires
“Rich in atmosphere and vibrating with suspense, The King of Gaheena is the work of a man who really knows his stuff.” – Leah Stewart, author of Body of a Girl and The Myth of You and Me
