Children of Light

David Bowman

The most unloved child of all Stone's work (even editor Robert Gottlieb hated it), this novel contains the psychic framework of a good noir while simultaneously being the burnout death of the genre (despite noble attempts at resurrection by Jonathan Lethem (Gun With Occasional Music) and Charlie Smith (Chimney Rock). Stone dispenses the crime elements offstage, and then wallows in drugs, suicide, madness, Oedipal failures and Mexico -- the traditional dumping ground for noir.
— Salon

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Before he is fully awake, Gordon Walker, intellectual manque, failed playwright in his 40s and modestly successful screenwriter-actor, has already consumed his daily hits of valium, alcohol and cocaine. "Stoned, abandoned, desolate,'' he is a melancholy case, teetering at the edge of the precipice; his wife has fled, his children are estranged, he feels desperately alone. Bereft, he goes to Mexico, where his old love Les Verger, a gifted actress who is herself in thrall to dope, drink and episodic madness, is shooting a picture Walker wrote. From the beginning, the air is filled with portent. Their meeting is delayed, and with each intervening event, the tension and sense of impending doom mount. When they do meet, they will be left to the mercies of their flayed nerves and their inner ruin. The tale is swiftly and expertly told; the momentum is headlong, swirling; the talk stunning, spinning out of its energies and one crackling scene after another. There can be no mistaking that this is the work of a formidably gifted writer.

Library Journal

Adrift since his wife left him, tasting "death and ruin,'' screenwriter Gordon Walker needs "a little something to get by on'' beyond alcohol and cocaine; so he seeks out his old lover LuAnne, an actress on location in Mexico where she's filming Walker's script of Kate Chopin's The Awakening. A "true'' artist who works "without a net,'' schizophrenic LuAnne is on the verge of a breakdown. Walker survives their explosive reunion and saves himself, but LuAnne acts out her carefully fore shadowed fate. Moviemaking images of dark and light, illusion and invention is the metaphorical frame for this intense, symbolic novel that dramatizes a moral vision of violence and evil in a world where "Things don't work out....They just be." Powerful fiction by the author of Dog Soldiers, which won the National Book Award in 1975. Janet Wiehe, P.L. of Cincinnati & Hamilton Cty.