Bøger af Eugene Flinn

Volume Two continues the adventures, mishaps and indiscretions of the world of Penfield Prep from which Headmaster Wellington escapes with his mischievous wife until the heat dies down. She had been arrested as a hooker after being found half-naked on a busy street while researching material for a novel. He leaves the campus in charge of his assistant, Dr. Seymour Snipe, erudite and generally competent except for one peculiar habit: his fetish for stealing little girls' underthings from the village laundromat. This provides an opportunity for ambitious Dr. Yang Sun, the peripatetic teacher who is constantly spying on everyone-teachers and students alike-and has hiding places that include rest rooms and empty swimming pools In the midst of a blinding New England snowstorm, Hypatia Hogan and her father, Mick, lead the hunt for a missing student, complicated by the news that a former teacher, who had been assigned to Penfield's private mental institution, had escaped and is running around in the blizzard with a loaded revolver.

The Love Chateau is the story of a Shangri-La for lovers. It is preceded by seven different kinds of love stories, not easy to categorize because most of the principal characters are not usually thought of as lovers, although the warmth we associate with love is there, wearing different clothes. Here the reader will also find stories of social comment, mystery, magical realism, and, most of all, humor. One finds humor in the tale of the Irishman who did not believe in baths but used Vicks VapoRub instead of soap, the adventures of the inventors of sperm necklaces and the locksmith who collected $2,500 for making a single key for the chastity belt for the beautiful wife of a jealous husband. Along the way you will read of the makeshift church service in an automobile showroom that is interrupted by the sudden entrance of a Go-Go dancer looking for her misplaced G-string when, unbeknown to the staid worshippers, the auto showroom had a different function.

Hypatia Hogan is driven to New Hampshire by her father, Mick, in his broken-down Rambler for a job interview at Penfield Prep, almost convinced that she will not get the position because her father had just told her that he had mailed a newspaper clipping with her resume describing a near riot recently when she was chosen Miss Hudson County over some local favorites. Little did she know that the headmaster and English Department Chair had their fingers crossed that she won't turn down the job as 47 others had after they learned that the opening had been created because the last teacher was sent to Penfield Prep's private mental institution after the school had driven him mad. And he was not the only Penfield Prep teacher and alumnus at the funny farm.

Readers who seek a vivid and memorable picture of urban boyhood in the first half of the 20th century need look no further. Boyd to Malachy to Chance describes the world of a young boy during the Great Depression (Boyd) through a scholarship to a Prep school (Malachy) to army service in Europe during World War II (Chance) We see the inhibited advances of the youth to his first love when he leaves for the army, where his horizons broaden as he meets young men from other parts of the country. Then the shipping of his unit to Britain, to the beaches of France and to the frozen woods around Bastogne, where the bloody Battle of the Bulge was fought. Every page is alive with a journalist's objectivity, yet the novel makes a strong appeal to the reader's emotions. The powerful impact is doubly effective because all the portraits are so memorably drawn. In short, the novel is so powerful because it is so real, and especially because all the people on the pages come to life.