The Beggar's Shore

As well-known writer Andrew Vachss (Choice of Evil) explains in a promotional letter, Red 71 Press (of which he is a founding member) was created ""for the express purpose"" of publishing this debut novel by a Chicago freelance writer. Freighted with the expectations raised by such a bold declaration of support, Mucha's urban parable struggles to bring its ill-fated characters to convincing life. Bleak, stiffly written and often simplistic in its moral grappling, the novel blunders aimlessly in and out of vagrant points of view as it chronicles the hapless odyssey of young Joseph Askew, who was born and has spent his entire life in the People's Church of Chicago, a religious cult commune. When his parents are exiled to a remote parish in Iowa a month before his 18th birthday, Joseph opts to leave the group. But life on the mean streets proves daunting and dangerous. Escaping enslavement by a duo of toughs engaged in selling inhalants to kids, Joseph is taken in by the Mayor, an albino alcoholic pedophile who puts him to work as a shoplifter. Eventually breaking free, Joseph finds a job in a liquor store after taking up with a junkie girlfriend who trades sexual favors to support her habit. The shopworn parade of transvestites, two-bit whores and assorted unwashed street denizens blur into a crowd as the feckless Joseph is exploited at every turn. Composing his chronicle in fragmented vignettes, Mucha succeeds in conveying the dead-end empty lives of people trapped by poverty, drugs and hopelessness. The narrative has a certain power as one follows Joseph's search for a path out of the maze of circumstance that traps him, but the tension dissipates once it becomes obvious that he is incapable of extricating himself. (Oct.)