cover image SEARCHING FOR INTRUDERS: A Novel in Stories

SEARCHING FOR INTRUDERS: A Novel in Stories

Stephen Raleigh Byler, . . Morrow, $23.95 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-06-621294-4

Resilience, empathy and a dark sense of humor sustain the well-intentioned perennial loser whose flat but curiously captivating voice guides us through the linked narratives that make up Byler's impressive debut. A walking wounded spawn of Reading, Pa., 34-year-old Wilson Hues vainly battles roaches, blunders into domestic disputes he can neither control nor understand, gets a divorce, takes up a terminally ill lover ("Pollute me, please"), loses her, too, and finally flees the country altogether, seeking affirmation (or maybe just plain solace) through yet another doomed relationship (this time with a diseased animal). Wilson's monotonous litany of woe is interspersed with increasingly disturbing flashbacks to his family's tortuous disintegration, his father's horrific death after a plane crash and finally the brutal double murder of a friend's parents. It is appropriate that Wilson becomes fascinated with Stephen Hawking's descriptions of the matter/antimatter collisions that make up the universe: he himself is one of those stubborn particles whose repeated collisions refuse to yield any sort of universal resolution. Byler's novel-in-installments winds down with a bleak metaphor for Wilson's alienation and his perennially self-defeating search for love: he briefly adopts a stray dog in a South American country with a federal culling policy. In disciplined and straightforward prose, Byler creates a dystopic vision of roadside America, full of the doomed and damned, perfect January reading. (Jan.)

Forecast:This promising first novel is supported by a five-city author tour and a 15-city NPR campaign, and should provide Byler with a firm base on which to build his career.