Pretty standard paperback with cover image that suggests way more intrigue than is actually present between the covers.
Author: John Berendt
Publication: 1994
Genre: It’s a little unclear, honestly?
Two in a row as I try to catch up on the backlog! This one’s a doozy.
I cannot understand for the life of my why people love this book. The plot meanders around and goes absolutely nowhere. The characters might have been ~interesting~ when the book was published in 1994 but certainly not in 2020. Why do I need an entire chapter of Emma Kelly galavanting around rural Georgia? Why does Chablis keep getting reintroduced for shock value? (And oof, the 1980s lack of distinction between drag queen and transgender person is cringy.) Why bother with Joe Odom, who is the most boring and possibly least successful conman in literature? Also, please could we have less of Minerva.
The book does its job as a window into Savannah in a particular time and place. I’m unsure whether I would have liked it more if it had stuck with that or dialed back the travelogue content and attempted to construct a compelling narrative in its place. It can’t do both.
I’m particularly offended by the novel’s attempt to frame itself as a “true crime” story. The author has obviously messed with the timeline and characters for dramatic effect, going so far as to act as if he casually wandered down to Savannah out of his own interest rather than explicitly to cover the murder trials.
I’m giving Midnight one or two more stars than it probably deserves on the grounds that I really did enjoy the middle section of it. The early chapters of Part Two are engaging and fooled me in to thinking the plot was finally going somewhere. (Spoiler, no, it was merely going to more sidebar character portraits.) Jim Williams is a character it is awfully difficult to care about, the narrator is an unacknowledged character it is awfully difficult to relate to, and honestly by the end of the whole thing I was just tired.