cover image Pilgrims Upon the Earth

Pilgrims Upon the Earth

Brad Land, . . Random, $23.95 (227pp) ISBN 978-1-4000-6380-2

Land’s 2004 memoir, Goat, which told of his abduction and beating at the hands of two hitchhikers as well as the fraternity hazing he suffered at Clemson University, portrayed a powerless postadolescent male at odds with a violent culture. A similar theme informs his glum first novel, a plodding study of teenage angst featuring 15-year-old Terry Webber, who lives in a South Carolina textile factory town with his shift foreman father (his mother committed suicide when Terry was a toddler). Terry smokes a lot (cigarettes, pot), fights with his dad and ritually cuts himself. He falls for Alice Washington, an odd girl who, apropos of nothing, says things like: “Could you be still with me? When everything else is so loud I fall down?” The two light out for Colorado where Alice’s sister lives on a commune, but Alice abruptly dies in a car wreck. The death and a move to yet another crap town sends Terry spiraling. Without much narrative direction, attention is drawn to the spare prose, which has a Prozac flatness. (June)