omensetter’s luck

i’m not saying i didn’t like The VVitch, because i did, but i have to admit i took issue a little bit with how present the devil was and how incredibly not present God was. if God remains in his heaven and the devil is in your garage it’s like, sorry Man, i’m going team devil on this one. i got no reason to root for the team that can’t even be bothered to play.

this book starts out bein about a guy (Brackett Omensetter) who moves into a small Ohio town called Gilean in the 1890’s. then for a little while it’s about his weird friendship with his self-loathing landlord (Henry Pimber). and then the rest of the entire book is about the local priest (the monstrous Jethro Furber) and his struggle with insanity, the first straight 80 pages of which is a hellish stream-of-consciousness form of gibberish written from the perspective of his own mind eating itself. its effectiveness lies precisely where The VVitch kind of felt like it failed me—Furber’s obviously unreliable narrative means i had no idea if the devil was present in Gilean or not. he sure thinks it is, which from our perspective is easily as terrifying, but his path towards allying himself with the forces of evil isn’t an obvious play-the-hand-you’re-dealt type of thing, and there’s a terrific amount of suspense in following this (irredeemable?) psychopath’s journey through whether Omensetter is a harbinger of witchlike forces invading Gilean or not. still not my favorite Gass but worth the difficulty of the middle section for sure