The Body Electric by Brent Terry
Thomas Finnegan “Finn” McGuinn has it all: an adoring wife, loyal friends, a childhood bestie named Beannie, year round sunshine, a car that starts, an absolutely bitchin’ record collection, a mountain bike, soft trails to run on, and a community that delivers. But when a thunderstorm blows his life apart, he finds himself with a life-threatening compulsion and an affliction that prevents him from physical contact with others.
Told across multiple timelines from theperspectives of various characters, the reader encounters runners, painters, polyamorous pastry chefs and lesbian punk rockers who populate the lives of our lovers, creating a kaleidoscopic world Finn longs to reenter. The Body Electric tells the story of glorious young love, the cruelty of fate, of a psyche dealing with catastrophic loss in mystifying ways. It shows how lightning, in the form of random encounters, can strike twice, and perhaps reanimate a character who has become more lifelike than truly alive.
Details
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:978-1-950730-35-3
Publication Date: February 11, 2020
Reviews
"Brent Terry is that rarest of entities: a gifted prose stylist with vision and high moral purpose. His writerly eye is acute. His instinct around a sentence is virtuosic and masterful. In The Body Electric, Terry takes us on a journey from the palpably familiar to the deliciously imaginative realms of truth. Reading this lush and lyrical novel is a visceral experience; it feels like waking up and stretching. A marvelous debut."
--Chris Torockio, author of "Floating Holidays" and "The Soul Hunters"
Wry and elegiac, erotic and inventive, Brent Terry's The Body Electric is a pulsing, thrumming novel. "Lightning strikes and strikes and strikes," he writes, reminding us that life itself is a live wire, dangerous and utile and ultimately, miraculous. Terry's kinetic prose unspools a story about the complicated business of being alive, of chasing ghosts, of catching ghosts-- and of letting ghosts go.
--Jill Alexander Essbaum, NYT bestselling author of "Hausfrau"