The Brightest Place in the World: A Novel: Western Literature and Fiction Series
Autor David Philip Mullinsen Limba Engleză Hardback – 2 iun 2020 – vârsta ani
Inspired by true events, The Brightest Place in the World traces the lives of four characters haunted by an industrial disaster. On an ordinary sunny morning in 2012, a series of explosions level a chemical plant on the outskirts of Las Vegas. The shock waves are felt as far away as Fremont Street. Homes and businesses suffer broken windows and caved-in roofs. Hundreds are injured, and eight employees of the plant are unaccounted for, presumed dead.
One of the missing is maintenance technician Andrew Huntley, a husband and father who is an orbital force in the novel as those who loved him grapple with his loss. Andrew’s best friend, Russell Martin—an anxiety-plagued bartender who calms his nerves with a steady inflow of weed—misses him more than he might a brother. Meanwhile Emma, Russell’s wife—a blackjack dealer at a downtown casino—tries to keep her years-long affair with Andrew hidden. Simon Addison, a manager at the plant who could have saved Andrew’s life, is afflicted by daily remorse, combined with a debilitating knowledge of his own cowardice. And then there’s Maddie, Andrew’s only child, a model high-school student whose response to the tragedy is to experiment with shoplifting and other deviant behavior.
Against the sordid backdrop of Las Vegas—and inspired by the PEPCON disaster of May 4, 1988—this engaging novel is a story of grief and regret, disloyalty and atonement, infatuation and love.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781948908412
ISBN-10: 1948908417
Pagini: 240
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 28 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Ediția:1
Editura: University of Nevada Press
Colecția University of Nevada Press
Seria Western Literature and Fiction Series
ISBN-10: 1948908417
Pagini: 240
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 28 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Ediția:1
Editura: University of Nevada Press
Colecția University of Nevada Press
Seria Western Literature and Fiction Series
Recenzii
Every few years a writer comes along to tell us a new story about a place we thought we knew. David Philip Mullins is that writer. Las Vegas is his world. Gone are the glitter and the glamour; revealed are the jarring effects of an industrial disaster in a massive, ever-changing city. Through four compelling characters, Mullins examines the universal themes of family, loss, sex, and the yearning to communicate. Carefully written in beautiful prose, The Brightest Place in the World is a moving and stunning novel from a natural writer.
—Chris Offutt, author of My Father, the Pornographer and Country Dark
The Brightest Place in the World portrays how tragedy and grief upend us and turn us reckless. Mullins writes with grace, and with tenderness for his characters. Through his storytelling, a nuanced and intimate Las Vegas—a town full of both heartache and love—comes alive.
—Edan Lepucki, New York Times bestselling author of California and Woman No. 17
In The Brightest Place in the World, David Philip Mullins deftly incorporates a ferocious chemical plant explosion outside Las Vegas in a narrative about the shocks and emotional resonance of loss, exploring how four expertly delineated characters try to reconstruct their lives in the aftermath. It’s a book as intriguing as it is artfully made.
—Ron Hansen, author of Mariette in Ecstasy and Atticus
A traumatic explosion reverberates beyond the physical in this remarkable debut novel from David Philip Mullins.... Las Vegas itself emerges as a character in this finely wrought and keenly observed story, which shines a brilliant light on the fragile ties that bind us.
—Allison Amend, author of A Nearly Perfect Copy and Enchanted Islands
My life stopped for two days while I read this novel. The Brightest Place in the World accomplishes what only our best art attempts. In these pages, David Philip Mullins tracks the vagaries and desires of people we recognize as they deal with the unthinkable: illicit sex, crazy scams, betrayals, loneliness. This book is a love letter to Las Vegas, the western desert, and, most of all, the mysteries of the human heart.
—Charles Bock, New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Children and Alice & Oliver
Mullins’s sentences shimmer and shine, dazzling the reader like the lights of the Las Vegas Strip. But there’s so much beyond the beauty of the writing. As these characters navigate the horrific aftermath of a tragedy, we witness the full spectrum of human strengths and failings. The Brightest Place in the World is an extraordinary novel, full of turns and revelations, of humanity and compassion.
—Ian Stansel, author of The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo
—Chris Offutt, author of My Father, the Pornographer and Country Dark
The Brightest Place in the World portrays how tragedy and grief upend us and turn us reckless. Mullins writes with grace, and with tenderness for his characters. Through his storytelling, a nuanced and intimate Las Vegas—a town full of both heartache and love—comes alive.
—Edan Lepucki, New York Times bestselling author of California and Woman No. 17
In The Brightest Place in the World, David Philip Mullins deftly incorporates a ferocious chemical plant explosion outside Las Vegas in a narrative about the shocks and emotional resonance of loss, exploring how four expertly delineated characters try to reconstruct their lives in the aftermath. It’s a book as intriguing as it is artfully made.
—Ron Hansen, author of Mariette in Ecstasy and Atticus
A traumatic explosion reverberates beyond the physical in this remarkable debut novel from David Philip Mullins.... Las Vegas itself emerges as a character in this finely wrought and keenly observed story, which shines a brilliant light on the fragile ties that bind us.
—Allison Amend, author of A Nearly Perfect Copy and Enchanted Islands
My life stopped for two days while I read this novel. The Brightest Place in the World accomplishes what only our best art attempts. In these pages, David Philip Mullins tracks the vagaries and desires of people we recognize as they deal with the unthinkable: illicit sex, crazy scams, betrayals, loneliness. This book is a love letter to Las Vegas, the western desert, and, most of all, the mysteries of the human heart.
—Charles Bock, New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Children and Alice & Oliver
Mullins’s sentences shimmer and shine, dazzling the reader like the lights of the Las Vegas Strip. But there’s so much beyond the beauty of the writing. As these characters navigate the horrific aftermath of a tragedy, we witness the full spectrum of human strengths and failings. The Brightest Place in the World is an extraordinary novel, full of turns and revelations, of humanity and compassion.
—Ian Stansel, author of The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo
Notă biografică
David Philip Mullins is the author of Greetings from Below and associate professor of English at Creighton University. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and his fiction has appeared in many publications, including in The Yale Review, Ecotone, Cimarron Review, Fiction, and Folio.
Extras
CHAPTER ONE: RUSSELL
He spots the smoke off to the south, nine or ten miles away, maybe more. A dark cloud bellies out over the country clubs and subdivisions that have come to occupy the once-vacant periphery of the valley. He merges into the fast lane, lifts his glasses to his forehead, the better to see. The cloud moves swiftly, and he leans forward to follow its course, watching the interstate from the corner of his eye. High above the mountains to the east, a blue stretch of air is split horizontally by the chalk-line contrail of a jet plane. In no time at all the smoke erases the plane’s condensation from the sky, making its broad, black way toward Lake Mead and the Arizona border.
Moments earlier the sound startled him, crashing like a wave, deep and resonant. It’s quiet now, and Russell listens to a headwind push steadily at the windshield, to the hollow drone of tires against pavement. He wonders, in the stillness of the front seat, if some sort of bomb has gone off at one of the far-flung casinos of south Las Vegas. Ever since 9/11 there’s been talk of potential attacks on the city, a few resorts on the Strip still searching backpacks and handbags on New Year’s Eve and the Fourth of July, hampering their crowded entrances with metal detectors and armed guards. The glare of a mid-morning sun gives the interstate a kind of waxen luster that almost blinds him if he pays attention to it. An odor of exhaust permeates the atmosphere of his little sedan, charter buses, and eighteen-wheelers making canyons of the lanes. Russell lowers the passenger-side window and squints out at the cloud of smoke, whose proportions suddenly double before his eyes. And then he hears it again, the very same sound—like a clap of thunder, like cannon fire at a football game—followed this time by a series of pops. They keep coming: pop, pop, pop! Each one louder, clearer, than the last.
He feels a throb of apprehension, then the guilty relief that comes whenever catastrophe strikes a remote region of the world, that unsavory sense of security brought about by the misfortunes of strangers: unlike those who might have already perished in the explosions or the ensuing fire, he is still alive. He raises the window and speeds up to seventy, tailgating an old Ford Mustang, reasoning that a terrorist’s targets would be the MGM or Bellagio or the Venetian, Fremont Street or Nellis Air Force Base, places of size and prominence, not a little-known edge of the valley. It’s ten-thirty, a gusty Tuesday in May, and Russell is heading south on 515, on his way home from the All or Nothing after twelve straight hours tending bar—a shift and a half, because money’s tight. He’s a good deal stoned, as he often is during his drive back from the tavern. Weed calms him, and Russell needs to be calmed, each and every day. Sometimes, as a matter of course, it has the opposite effect, making him fearful. It seems to be doing so this morning, for he finds himself concerned about Emma, his wife, who’s having brunch with a girlfriend downtown—many miles in the other direction. She’s perfectly safe. The assumption appeases his fear, and he slows the Corolla and merges back into the middle lane.
He turned off the radio after the first explosion, and now Russell turns it back on, scanning the AM news stations until he hears mention of the fire. The exact location is unknown, a reporter explains in a slow, hardened voice. Somewhere in the desert southeast of Las Vegas, the man says, possibly a chemical plant, and before he can add another word, Russell feels a prickly tension across his forehead and around his ears, a crown of dread. Something in his stomach tautens like a cord. The WEPCO plant, where his friend Andrew works—it’s out that way, just beyond the city.
He’s known Andrew since middle school, where they shared a homeroom, their friendship a constant for the past thirty years. Russell, an only child, has always thought of him as a brother. He digs around in the console for a tissue, blinking as he steers the Corolla back into the fast lane. His left eye waters when he’s anxious, and he lifts his glasses again and dabs at it, the reporter’s voice turning soft and indistinct, held for Russell in some kind of abeyance—there and not there. The air conditioner whirs and the wind pushes harder at the windshield. Traffic zips along as if nothing has happened.
The smoke continues over the mountains, drifting higher into the sky. From the pocket of his shirt he fingers his lighter and the joint he rolled the day before, a half-smoked pinner containing the last of his supply. For as long as Russell can recall he’s suffered from unpredictable panic attacks that not only start his eye watering but also cause his mouth to dry up and his hands to tremble furiously. His temples will grow slick with sweat, and for minutes on end he’ll sit wheezing as though he’s sucking air through a penny whistle. Cannabis, when it does its job, is both a neutralizer and a preventive. He toked the first half of the joint at work, on his way out of the parking lot. Now he lights the second half and inhales. He smokes it down to a roach and then stubs it out in the ashtray.
The plant produces a chemical called ammonium perchlorate—an oxidizer for rocket fuel—though Andrew has no background in chemistry or any other science. He’s a maintenance technician and has been with WEPCO, the Western Engineering & Production Company, for the past seven or so years. It’s among a small handful of chemical plants in that part of the desert, with their turbines and storage tanks and great warrens of above-ground piping, slender smokestacks aimed like howitzers at the sky, white plumes mingling above. There’s a marshmallow factory out there as well—a factory that manufactures an edible product right in the middle of a bunch of chemical plants. Russell can just imagine the range of hazardous substances stored within the confines of such places, what negligent or unscrupulous activity occurs, not that Andrew himself would ever be responsible. Who knows to what degree their secretions have contaminated the local ecosystem? It was a matter of time, Russell supposes, before something exploded.
* * *
He keeps south on the interstate, his thoughts turning to Andrew’s house, which isn’t very far from the plants. Russell wonders about Juliet, Andrew’s wife, and about Maddie, their daughter. Are they in harm’s way? Juliet—an art therapist—should be at her office by now. Maddie should be in class, her high school a safe-enough distance to the north.
Maybe he’s overreacting. He’s hopped up; his brain isn’t right, isn’t operating the way it’s supposed to. I’m panicked, Russell thinks. In a state. Jumping to conclusions. He has no idea if the explosions have in fact taken place at WEPCO—or, despite the news station’s hypothesis, at any of the plants at all.
Smoke has consumed much of the air above the mountains, bulking like an enormous rain cloud. Anyone in the vicinity, says the man on the radio, should take immediate shelter. No sooner has the reporter concluded his warning than Russell hears five or six more pops, accompanied by another crash of sound. He feels this one in his seat, a hard double-jouncing, as if the car has passed too quickly over a speed bump.
“Andrew,” he says, not quite aloud, smoke sweeping upward in a thick black column tinged with rose. Russell exits the interstate and drives in the direction of Andrew’s neighborhood, the whole southeastern sky rolling and fattening. Clouds expanding into clouds.
He spots the smoke off to the south, nine or ten miles away, maybe more. A dark cloud bellies out over the country clubs and subdivisions that have come to occupy the once-vacant periphery of the valley. He merges into the fast lane, lifts his glasses to his forehead, the better to see. The cloud moves swiftly, and he leans forward to follow its course, watching the interstate from the corner of his eye. High above the mountains to the east, a blue stretch of air is split horizontally by the chalk-line contrail of a jet plane. In no time at all the smoke erases the plane’s condensation from the sky, making its broad, black way toward Lake Mead and the Arizona border.
Moments earlier the sound startled him, crashing like a wave, deep and resonant. It’s quiet now, and Russell listens to a headwind push steadily at the windshield, to the hollow drone of tires against pavement. He wonders, in the stillness of the front seat, if some sort of bomb has gone off at one of the far-flung casinos of south Las Vegas. Ever since 9/11 there’s been talk of potential attacks on the city, a few resorts on the Strip still searching backpacks and handbags on New Year’s Eve and the Fourth of July, hampering their crowded entrances with metal detectors and armed guards. The glare of a mid-morning sun gives the interstate a kind of waxen luster that almost blinds him if he pays attention to it. An odor of exhaust permeates the atmosphere of his little sedan, charter buses, and eighteen-wheelers making canyons of the lanes. Russell lowers the passenger-side window and squints out at the cloud of smoke, whose proportions suddenly double before his eyes. And then he hears it again, the very same sound—like a clap of thunder, like cannon fire at a football game—followed this time by a series of pops. They keep coming: pop, pop, pop! Each one louder, clearer, than the last.
He feels a throb of apprehension, then the guilty relief that comes whenever catastrophe strikes a remote region of the world, that unsavory sense of security brought about by the misfortunes of strangers: unlike those who might have already perished in the explosions or the ensuing fire, he is still alive. He raises the window and speeds up to seventy, tailgating an old Ford Mustang, reasoning that a terrorist’s targets would be the MGM or Bellagio or the Venetian, Fremont Street or Nellis Air Force Base, places of size and prominence, not a little-known edge of the valley. It’s ten-thirty, a gusty Tuesday in May, and Russell is heading south on 515, on his way home from the All or Nothing after twelve straight hours tending bar—a shift and a half, because money’s tight. He’s a good deal stoned, as he often is during his drive back from the tavern. Weed calms him, and Russell needs to be calmed, each and every day. Sometimes, as a matter of course, it has the opposite effect, making him fearful. It seems to be doing so this morning, for he finds himself concerned about Emma, his wife, who’s having brunch with a girlfriend downtown—many miles in the other direction. She’s perfectly safe. The assumption appeases his fear, and he slows the Corolla and merges back into the middle lane.
He turned off the radio after the first explosion, and now Russell turns it back on, scanning the AM news stations until he hears mention of the fire. The exact location is unknown, a reporter explains in a slow, hardened voice. Somewhere in the desert southeast of Las Vegas, the man says, possibly a chemical plant, and before he can add another word, Russell feels a prickly tension across his forehead and around his ears, a crown of dread. Something in his stomach tautens like a cord. The WEPCO plant, where his friend Andrew works—it’s out that way, just beyond the city.
He’s known Andrew since middle school, where they shared a homeroom, their friendship a constant for the past thirty years. Russell, an only child, has always thought of him as a brother. He digs around in the console for a tissue, blinking as he steers the Corolla back into the fast lane. His left eye waters when he’s anxious, and he lifts his glasses again and dabs at it, the reporter’s voice turning soft and indistinct, held for Russell in some kind of abeyance—there and not there. The air conditioner whirs and the wind pushes harder at the windshield. Traffic zips along as if nothing has happened.
The smoke continues over the mountains, drifting higher into the sky. From the pocket of his shirt he fingers his lighter and the joint he rolled the day before, a half-smoked pinner containing the last of his supply. For as long as Russell can recall he’s suffered from unpredictable panic attacks that not only start his eye watering but also cause his mouth to dry up and his hands to tremble furiously. His temples will grow slick with sweat, and for minutes on end he’ll sit wheezing as though he’s sucking air through a penny whistle. Cannabis, when it does its job, is both a neutralizer and a preventive. He toked the first half of the joint at work, on his way out of the parking lot. Now he lights the second half and inhales. He smokes it down to a roach and then stubs it out in the ashtray.
The plant produces a chemical called ammonium perchlorate—an oxidizer for rocket fuel—though Andrew has no background in chemistry or any other science. He’s a maintenance technician and has been with WEPCO, the Western Engineering & Production Company, for the past seven or so years. It’s among a small handful of chemical plants in that part of the desert, with their turbines and storage tanks and great warrens of above-ground piping, slender smokestacks aimed like howitzers at the sky, white plumes mingling above. There’s a marshmallow factory out there as well—a factory that manufactures an edible product right in the middle of a bunch of chemical plants. Russell can just imagine the range of hazardous substances stored within the confines of such places, what negligent or unscrupulous activity occurs, not that Andrew himself would ever be responsible. Who knows to what degree their secretions have contaminated the local ecosystem? It was a matter of time, Russell supposes, before something exploded.
* * *
He keeps south on the interstate, his thoughts turning to Andrew’s house, which isn’t very far from the plants. Russell wonders about Juliet, Andrew’s wife, and about Maddie, their daughter. Are they in harm’s way? Juliet—an art therapist—should be at her office by now. Maddie should be in class, her high school a safe-enough distance to the north.
Maybe he’s overreacting. He’s hopped up; his brain isn’t right, isn’t operating the way it’s supposed to. I’m panicked, Russell thinks. In a state. Jumping to conclusions. He has no idea if the explosions have in fact taken place at WEPCO—or, despite the news station’s hypothesis, at any of the plants at all.
Smoke has consumed much of the air above the mountains, bulking like an enormous rain cloud. Anyone in the vicinity, says the man on the radio, should take immediate shelter. No sooner has the reporter concluded his warning than Russell hears five or six more pops, accompanied by another crash of sound. He feels this one in his seat, a hard double-jouncing, as if the car has passed too quickly over a speed bump.
“Andrew,” he says, not quite aloud, smoke sweeping upward in a thick black column tinged with rose. Russell exits the interstate and drives in the direction of Andrew’s neighborhood, the whole southeastern sky rolling and fattening. Clouds expanding into clouds.
Descriere
Based on a true event, The Brightest Place in the World traces the lives and interactions of six Las Vegans in the wake of an industrial disaster. Grief and regret, disloyalty and atonement, infatuation and love—all are on display as the characters struggle to recover and adjust when their lives are forever changed.