Soul Resin

Shifting points of view, newspaper accounts, letters and lectures combine to tell the strange and remarkable story of Mills Loomis Mills, an obsessive and intelligent college dropout who's haunted by ghosts, his girlfriend's murder and ""yelping blood cells"" (yes, blood whether spilled that day or 150 years ago communicates to the hero). First-time novelist C.W. Cannon's narrative gimmicks and occasionally overheated prose might turn off some of Soul Resin's readers, but others will appreciate the parallels between such authorial extravagance and trickery and Cannon's darkly gothic tale, which is set in his native (and also rather gothic) New Orleans.