Dawn Song

Opposing powers in Hell use human surrogates to duke out their differences in this ambitious but ponderously overwritten dark fantasy debut. The immortal adversaries in Marano's occult cosmos are Belial, the Unbowed One, whose earthly emissary is a sexually voracious succubus named Jeannette, and Leviathan, the Enfolded One, who embodies what ""the world knows as patriotism, bold enterprise, religious fervor, and righteous indignation."" The mortal puppets whose strings they pull include sensitive gay bookstore clerk Lawrence, Harvard Divinity School student Ed Sloane (Lawrence's unrequited love interest) and a motley assortment of hangers-on to the Boston academic community. Set in 1990, at the height of the Gulf War, the novel attempts to delineate kabbalistic forces that shape the turmoil of individual lives and global dramas. But Marano's dark divinities, whose thoughts manifest in eccentrically typeset passages, are inscrutable to mere mortal readers. His human characters are not much clearer: mired in angst over the flaws that make them vulnerable to infernal influences, they can barely cross a room without collapsing into heaps of self-reflection. Marano compounds these drags on his narrative's momentum with an assault of awkward analogies and metaphors (""The mental images that strung his ideas into a cogent thesis were consigned to a particular hall of his memory palace. The mnemonic devices were displayed as suits of armor would be in the hall of a museum""). Despite its vividly imagined tableau of the world as a cosmic combat zone and average Americans as celestial soldiers, this novel is disappointingly devoid of the awe and mystery it strains so mightily to evoke. (June)