Julius Winsome in Booklist

I meant to include this in this morning's post about Gerard Donovan's wonderful Publishers Weekly review, but his novel JULIUS WINSOME also got a rave in Booklist:

"If Jim Thompson had written literary fiction, he might have concocted a novel similar to this one. The title character, living alone in the north Maine woods in the cabin his late father built and stocked with leather-bound first editions, gradually discovers the killer inside him after someone blasts his canine companion with a shotgun at point-blank range. A woman from the nearest hamlet once contrived to start a romance with the middle-aged Julius but fled after discovering the emotional troubles lurking beneath his well-read, soft-spoken exterior. With dawning horror and sadness, readers, too, come to realize how disturbed Julius is as he begins to stalk random hunters and employs fragmented, if poetic, logic to dope out which one of them murdered his dog. As he puts it in one of his increasingly rare lucid moments, "I didn't have feeling where I should and too much where I shouldn't. You keep away from men like me and you'll be alright in life." But safely encountered on the page, Julius exerts a strong pull on the imagination's darker corners."

--John Mark