2011 Book 9: The Bee-Loud Glade
by Doug Paul Case
Steve Himmer, editor of Necessary Fiction (one of the best online journals, period), is a lecturer in my department at Emerson College. The Bee-Loud Glade, his debut novel, will be released this April, and The Berkeley Beacon was lucky enough to receive an advanced copy—which I reviewed.
My main (and pretty much only complaint) is about the book’s ‘humor.’ As I’ve said and will continue to say, I have problems with written humor; I either miss it completely or laugh at something that wasn’t the joke. But I know enough to say definitively that ball jokes aren’t funny after the fourth one. They just aren’t.
But I don’t want that abundance to stop people from reading it, because it more than deserves to be read. The questions it raises about authorship, identity, and man’s place in nature are ones crucial to the writer’s existence. So while it may have made me cringe in places, the time I spent thinking about my role as a writer post-read more than made up for it.
And who knows, I’m sure many others won’t find that particular brand of humor as juvenile as I do.
