Egads! Author Takes Twain To The Dark Side.

In a kind of Huckleberry Finn meets Hannibal Lecter fushion, author Jon Clinch has expanded on one of the minor characters of Mark Twain's classic - Finn's drunken father, Pap.

"Finn," by first-time novelist Jon Clinch, seems like your usual standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants contraption. Its main character is Huckleberry Finn's alcoholic father, who cuts such a scary figure in Mark Twain's novel. Clinch restages some of Twain's scenes, and, as he says in an author's note, fits his story "meticulously into and around Pap Finn's appearances ... in 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'." In fact, Clinch's found his "road map" for much of "Finn" in a single scene in Twain: Huck's discovery of his father's corpse among some creepy artifacts: a woman's clothing, cloth masks, an artificial leg and, in charcoal on the walls, "the ignorantest kind of words and pictures."

You can find out for yourself just what Clinch has assembled from this Flannery O'Connor bric-a-brac. But his first six pages have a woman's corpse floating down the Mississippi and a blind man eating some sort of mysterious meat given to him by Pap, so it's fair to reveal that there's unpleasantness ahead. And Clinch's sense of the horrific includes more than simple violence. Here's Pap, after shattering a glass on his plank floor: " ... Before the whiskey can soak in he has flung himself prone and lapped up such of it as his desperate tongue can locate. He pays no mind to the slivers of wood ... although now and then a shard of glass does serve to impede his progress. He reckons that the more he presses forward the less he will have reason to mind, and in this he is after a fashion correct." Pap's brutality is ultimately self-directed, and the charcoal words and images on his walls are his means of "documenting his dissolution."

Yips! from Robbo: As a great fan of the Harry Flashman series, I can hardly start slinging stones at authors for pulling this kind of stunt per se. However, just from the quoted snippet, my keenly-trained literary mind tells me this one is gonna be a dog. I think I'll keep Pap confined to the shadowy background.

YIPS from Steve-O: Does he wind up nailing Ahab's wife? With Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern as his posse? Jes' askin'.