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THE STONE CIRCLE
By: Gary Goshgarian
Donald I. Fine Books, New York
1997 (hc)
This is one of those books that simply should have been better than it
was. Archaeologist Peter Van Zandt, recently widowed and trying to live
down a reputation for getting himself in fringe archaeology, is hired to
direct what could be a major contract CRM project on Kingdom Head Island,
located in Boston Harbor. Almost as soon as Peter and his young son Andy,
who is still suffering the trauma of losing his mother (the death of Linda
Van Zandt, we find out, was indirectly due to Peter’s volatile
temperament!), things begin to go badly. The archaeology survey is to take
place as construction crews continue to develop the island into a gigantic
casino/tourism complex, and the contractors are not very pleased that the
"archies" are slowing down the project. Veiled threats against
Peter and his newly arrived Earthwatch volunteer crew hang in the air as
they begin to lay out grids and put down test pits.
Almost at once three large stones are uncovered—stones that seem to
fit no Native American cultural scenario, nor do they really fit into the
casino developer’s hope that a colonial chapel might be excavated, which
could be used in the hoped-for tourist development. The discovery of the
stones seem to unleash an eerie set of occurrences, including Peter’s
recurring nightmares of witch trials and witch burnings, a runaway backhoe
that nearly kills Andy, a spectral pallid-faced watcher at the edge of the
woods, and visions of the deceased Linda morphing into the burning witch.
Now all of this does not necessarily make for great literature, but it
ought to make for great mid-summer beach reading. Unfortunately, author
Goshgarian simply does not write very well and his efforts at finding
appropriate similes, metaphors and other figures of speech hit the printed
page with painful thunks! In fact, that last sentence could be one
of his. He writes of "feeling the perspiration lubricating his
joints," (p.59) and there’s lots of "humming," as in ‘The
dream had hooked him, and he was humming with curiosity about where it was
going," (p. 63), and "He did not believe in karma, but the
moment started humming with rightness." On page 67 he writes of
"The cold feather (of fear) brushed across the base of Peter’s
skull." The "cold feather" simile, unfortunately, reappears
several times more. On page 70 we find that "Someplace in the center
of his brain a node opened. And the thought pistoled out…" This may
seem to be unfair "piling on" by the reviewer, but I must add
one more sentence to demonstrate what the reader had to endure for nearly
300 pages. On page 1431 we find out that "An electric rocket shot up
from his testes and exploded in his head (!)." There is also an all
but unforgivable reference to "Herman Schliemann," rather than
"Heinrich."
I belabor the clunky language in this novel because a mildly
interesting plot gets lost in this tangled thicket of verbiage (my God! It’s
catching!) to the point that this reader lost interest in the characters,
the possibility that the stones were part of a 6th Century
Celtic Circle of Stones, or whether the damned casino would ever be built.
I simply wanted the book to end!
With this review, we will begin an experiment in rating the books on
the basis of one to four trowels; one trowel= don’t bother, to four
trowels= run right out to your local book store and buy the hard cover!
Unfortunately, The Stone Circle gets (not surprisingly) one
trowel.
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