Review: "Split Image" by Ron Faust

 

Split Image by Ron Faust Forge, 1997   Split Image, which is Ron Faust’s tenth published novel, is best read cold and this review is loaded with spoilers. Read ahead at your own peril but rest assured it is fantastic. But if you insist… “It occurred to me—and this was my first conscious thought upon ‘awakening’—that the crows did not object to the carnage. Of course not. They were scavengers and were impatiently waiting their opportunity. Even so, I could not entirely dispel the notion that they were judging me—small black magistrates, feathery clerics.” This idea is Andrew Neville’s—a failed playwright with three early critical successes and nothing since, now making his living as an editor of a corporate newsletter. On a whim he travels to a primitive hunting cabin in the woods of northern Wisconsin. It is autumn, and deer are in season. Andrew takes an old bow from the cabin without any expectations of killing a deer, but when a buck cuts his trail, he is overtaken by a lusty greed. The deer is wounded and while tracking it Andrew comes to a man cleaning a buck. Andrew believes the deer is his, but the man calmly and reasonably claims it as his own. The two have a cold exchange of words; at the end Andrew kills the other man. He doesn’t remember the actual killing, but Andrew knows he did. He cleans up the cabin, disposes of the clothing and other evidence and returns to Chicago. A few days later he learns the man’s identity and realizes, for the first time, he had once known the man. They were in the same theater company, and while Andrew failed as a writer his victim found success in Hollywood. Andrew, after meeting his victim’s widow at the funeral, calculatingly insinuates himself into the dead man’s life. He moves into the boat house on his victim’s wooded estate, wears his clothing, befriends his only child, and smoothly woos his wife. The only barrier between Andrew taking over the man’s life is the despicable Roland Scheiss— “ ‘Scheiss means ‘shit’ in German, doesn’t it?’ ” Scheiss was hired by the murdered man’s parents to prove his widow, and by extension, Andrew Neville killed their son. Scheiss is truly loathsome. He is filthy, crude, and corrupt. His game is blackmail and he begins calling Andrew at odd moments of the night threatening, cajoling, taunting. Andrew remains calm, but his sanity begins to unravel. He converses with his victim in the dark hours, small meaningless events begin to weigh heavily on him, and finally his narrative turns suspect—is the tale truly happening as it is being told, or is the reader being deceived? Split Image is a fine novel—dark, riveting, and curious. It is as much literature as commercial. It weaves an enticing mixture of Edgar Allan Poe—think “The Tell-Tale Heart”—Alfred Hitchcock, and a 1950’s Gold Medal paperback. Andrew Neville is a cold, almost empty narrator, who is as interesting, and enigmatic as any character in popular literature. The prose is sparse, poetic and meaningful. It is also satisfying, thought-provoking, and damn good. And I mean, damn good. You should read it, really.

Ron Faust—before setting off on an adventuresome and transient adult life—was raised in Chicago and nearby Lake Geneva in Wisconsin. Which means Split Image’s setting is Faust’s home ground and Wisconsin’s dark woods are deftly woven into the tale with a frightening realism. So much so that Ron’s widow, Gayl, told me she couldn’t read Split Image because it felt too familiar to her, too real. You see, Gayl had been raised in the Lake Geneva area, too, and the pair married at a young age. She had followed Ron first to Colorado Springs and then to San Diego and Taos, New Mexico. Key West, Florida fit in there somewhere, too, before the couple returned to Lake Geneva in the early-1990s. Ron died of bladder cancer, the same disease that had killed is father, on August 31, 2011. His ashes were scattered in Lake Geneva. He was 75 years old.

Purchase a Kindle edition here and a paperback here at Amazon