Music for Torching

Bethany Schneider

This is a tale of the seamy underside of desire—for men, women, property, children, love—with a cast of somewhat charming, somewhat despicable, slightly imbecilic characters who are damned when they do and damned when they don't.
— OUT Magazine

David Gates

...[A] hellbound joyride of a book....[T]orches a whole genteel tradition of suburban fiction...in which some center of stability persists among the smug, the adulterous and the merely boring.
—Newsweek

Elle

Homes' dark sense of adult sexuality and family anxiety rises to a new level of black comedy.

Esquire

...Outre....John Cheever gone to hell...

Gary Krist

Some novels you either love or hate unequivocally. Others...elicit a more complex response....I found myself rapt from beginning to end, fascinated by Homes's single-minded talent for provocation. And for the two days it took me to read the novel, I could think about little else.
— The New York Times Book Review

Mademoiselle

The queen of bad-girl heroines puts her own sinister twist on all the cliches to create a hyperreal vision of men, women, marriage and suburbia.

Vanity Fair

Deviant brilliance.

Publishers Weekly

A child enters a suburban grammar school with a gun and explosives strapped to his body; a SWAT team moves in; a boy is shot at close range. This creepy and all too familiar scenario appears at a pivotal moment of Homes's latest novel (after The End of Alice), a caustically funny and eerily plausible portrait of a suburban family meltdown. In a nondescript Leave-it-to-Beaveresque Westchester neighborhood, Elaine and Paul find their marriage and their lives at a standstill: Paul commutes to a vaguely sinister corporate job ("how do you make people think fat is good?" asks his boss at one point) and enjoys weekly trysts with a neighbor, while Elaine plays housewife, attends school plays, and shops. Both feel desperately "stuck." In a fit of boredom and frustration, following two nights of cocktail parties and barbeques with the neighbors, the two kick their grill to the ground and partially burn down their house, an event that plunges them into a sordid suburban nightmare. Moving in with what seems the perfect couple, Pat and George, they leave their boys with families they scarcely know--a decision with perilous consequences. Paul begins popping pills and has an affair with a friend's girlfriend, a psychic known only as "the date," who has a penchant for phone sex and persuades him to get a tattoo on his shaved crotch, while Elaine is seduced by Pat, a Stepford Wife with a penchant for sex toys. Homes unflinchingly documents the disintegration of Elaine and Paul's family, paying explicit attention to the sexual ennui and sadistic impulses roiling beneath the sterile veneers of their lives. The dark underbelly of the average American neighborhood may seem an obvious theme, and Homes's vision of marital dysfunction is long on sardonic humor and short on profundity. But the denoument to which this disquieting tale carefully builds is powerful enough to seem coextensive with the latest, and most distressing, real-life suburban horrors. (May) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

What better ways for a hateful, hate-filled couple to alleviate their middle-aged suburban blues than to set fire to their home, sleep around, get a groin tattoo of snaking ivy during an executive lunch at the behest of the cheating girlfriend of one of the their best friends, cross-dress, curse each other endlessly, and treat their parental responsibilities as an annoying afterthought? Paul and Elaine live ugly lives doing ugly things to each other. They both have affairs with neighborhood wives, passively allow other sexual peccadilloes to happen to them, and then wonder why they are so miserable. Homes (The End of Alice, LJ 12/95) employs flat, stilted dialog to create a whiner's anthem of thoroughly unlikable people. To spice up this go-nowhere tale, she pulls out a headline from real news to create a tragedy of innocence wounded long before the actual bullet is fired. For larger libraries with a Homes fan base.--Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

David Gates

...[A] hellbound joyride of a book....[T]orches a whole genteel tradition of suburban fiction...in which some center of stability persists among the smug, the adulterous and the merely boring.
— Newsweek

Gary Krist

Some novels you either love or hate unequivocally. Others...elicit a more complex response....I found myself rapt from beginning to end, fascinated by Homes's single-minded talent for provocation. And for the two days it took me to read the novel, I could think about little else.
— The New York Times Book Review

Mademoiselle

The queen of bad-girl heroines puts her own sinister twist on all the cliches to create a hyperreal vision of men, women, marriage and suburbia.

Ariel Levy

The right number of gin-and-tonics may have pacified Cheever's suburbanites, but Holmes's characters are far more reckless and inventive in their coping strategies: They burn down their houses, smoke crack, tattoo their loins, and have sex with everything that moves and some things that don't.
— New York Magazine

Carlo McCormick

...[R]eturns to the uncannily familiar and mundane worlds that Homes is so good at twisting into astonishingly fantastical exaggerations.
— Paper Magazine

Gia Kourlas

[This novel] is scary— not because its violent or filled with dark, offbeat humor like the author's past work...but because it's so utterly banal...With such an unremarkable plot and stereotypical characters, who really cares?
— Time Out NY

Philip Weiss

...[S]trip away the special effects and you get the story of a marriage. This is what Homes does best, renders the emotional traffic of a couple in despair. The failure, the trying, the inability to imagine being anywhere else.
— The New York Observer

Kirkus Reviews

Paul and Elaine Weiss have a very bad ten days in this newest by Homes (The End of Alice, 1996, etc.), who takes her penchant for extreme situations and behavior to the suburbs. It begins as a typical Westchester County weekend: a dinner party followed by a barbecue at which everyone drinks too much and reveals their boredom and unhappiness—except that the Weisses top their neighbors in acting out. Elaine cuts Paul's neck with a knife on Friday; he has phone sex with their divorced buddy Henry's new girlfriend on Saturday; and they join forces on Sunday to set fire to their house, then head for a motel with their sons, sullen teen Daniel and asthmatic nine-year-old Sammy. Homes flings us into the middle of her protagonists' messed-up lives, yet for a long time keeps her readers emotionally distant from them. Whether detailing a lesbian encounter on a washing machine or genital tattooing, the narration doesn't bat an eye or hazard an explanation. This trendy flat affect consorts oddly but aptly with the author's rather generic satire of suburban society: though the time is clearly the present, the wives obsess about laundry and meals while the husbands commute to unspecified jobs at anonymous corporations in approved ‘50s fashion. It seems at first that Homes intends merely to patronize her characters. Then slowly, sneakily, without softening the weirdness and nasty edges of their actions, she entangles us in a sense of complicity with Elaine, Paul, and their equally troubled friends. "None are what they seem, none are what you think, none are what you'd want them to be," she writes in the book's most moving passage. "They all are both more and less—deeply human."Although too heavily foreshadowed, the climax is still shocking, drawing a jagged curtain across a drama with plenty of conflict but no real resolution. Seldom subtle but often effective and almost always deeply creepy. People will be talking about this one. (QPB featured alternate; author tour)