Beautiful Woman Without Mercy; And, the King of Scarecrows: Two Novels

Culbert's debut consists of two short novels, thematically linked by their characters' search through a darkened dreamscape for some sort of sanctuary. In the first, Kenjii Mott, a solitary traveler in a world where pecans and acorns are the only currency, loses his backpack full of belongings when he reaches the small town of Fate and stops at the home of a mysterious woman called Amy Survivor, obviously patterned after Keats's la belle dame sans merci. The second novella concerns The Scarecrow, a dead man who has joined a traveling freak show. These stories are not altogether bleak; rather silly and uneventful, they read like Kafka ``lite.'' But Culbert's tone is unpleasantly self-satisfied. His invented world is altogether too cute to convince, and the writing is sometimes embarrassingly inept: ``The moment of violence in the faded day faded like a fart.'' Only readers on a similar wavelength will enjoy these postmodern fables. (Apr.)