Wait Until Twilight

Pak mines the South for cliché in his trifling, melodramatic coming-of-age debut. Samuel is a 10th-grade boy and the reader's guide through the fictional backwoods town of Sugweepo, Ga. The driving force is, ostensibly, the narrator's horror and fascination with a set of wildly deformed triplets. Eventually, Samuel's encounter with the babies reveals a latent violent streak within him. But between these moments lays a wasteland wherein Samuel goes about regular high school student business. These bland filler passages sometimes lead to go-nowhere developments, such as Samuel's dead mother's friend, whom Samuel is attracted to. There is some indication she might be trying to seduce him, but the idea is quickly abandoned. The prose, meanwhile, is mundane (opening sentence: “The sun sits flat against the blue sky like someone pressed it on there with a giant thumb”). The portions of the novel dealing with the deformed babies offer some respite, but are plagued by a sloppy hammering home of the book's unsubtle and uncomplicated themes. (Aug.)