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Hunt's Station, the setting of Dana Andrew Jennings's new novel, Lonesome Standard Time, is a place better off forgotten. Isolated from the world by the ill-used and haunted Whispering Turnpike, an abandoned access road littered with wrecked cars, the once bucolic mountain town now is visited only by truckloads of noxious waste that fill the tarry, pitch black lagoons of Hunt Waste Management. Years ago the town sold itself to Sanborn Hunt for reasons either unknown or forgotten, and now Hunt Waste Management has turned this lonely hamlet into an ecological hell, a place wholly unlivable. Fires unexpectedly erupt from the ground, and smoke continually hangs in the air, rendering Hunt's Station more like an outpost of Dante's City of Dis than a place any sane individual would call home. Yet Jennings's novel focuses on one man's homecoming. Hank Rogers, Hunt's Station's long lost son, returns by force of a siren-like call to his birthplace to face the ghosts of his past and the twisted legacy of this guilt-ridden town.
Hank Rogers's story encapsulates the story of the town itself. With his return, a new set of forces is unleashed within Hunt's Station. Yet the overwhelming accomplishment of the narrative lies in Jennings's evocative and at times lyrical prose. Jennings's lucid, hard-edged style seems to be on a mission to capture both the dark and the humorous in his novel. Hunt's Station is populated with an often hilarious and often terrifying array of characters, all of whom play integral roles in Hank's homecoming. Through Hank, the reader meets Dirt Willy, Hunt Waste Management's foreman and maker of Willy Brew, the town's own king of beers; 17-year-old Maggie Parris, the town's youngest daughter, who desperately seeks to escape; Clare Hunt, Hank's high school love who now spends all her time hidden away inside her father's house; and finally, Lloyd Rogers, Hank's father and Hunt's Station's own banjo-playing Hank Williams. Through these and all of Jennings's characters comes the essence of Hunt's Station, both the heartbreak and guilt of the town's conscience and the characters' longing to escape from or transcend their own tainted past and present.
In returning to Hunt's Station, Hank Rogers becomes part of a dying town's last sputtering gasps. Lonesome Standard Time tells us that in facing the past we must be prepared to face ourselves. Hank's interaction with old neighbors and friends begins to influence the fate of the town and all its inhabitants. Hank's prodigal-like return takes him on his own journey--one which finds its physical manifestations in a dramatic suicide run in an old hot rod down Whispering Turnpike, as well as in the reestablishment of relations with Clare. Yet as Hank discovers himself, he also comes to realize the ways in which his life changes the lives around him. Written with a keen eye for description and characterization, Lonesome Standard Time is a stunning achievement both in its language and in the story it tells of discovery and loss.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.