The Garden of Blue Roses

by Michael Barsa

Overview

"Ominous, fantastic, and wonderfully malevolent.... I felt the spirits of Shirley Jackson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Albert Camus' Meursault, whispering to join the fun."-- Alice Sebold, best-selling and award-winning author of The Lovely Bones

A car lies at the bottom of an icy ravine. Slumped over the steering wheel, dead, is the most critically acclaimed horror writer of his time. Was it an accident? His son Milo doesn't care. For the first time in his life, he's free. No more nightmarish readings, spooky animal rites, or moonlit visions of his father in the woods with a notebook and vampire make-up.

Or so he thinks.

Milo settles into a quiet routine--constructing model Greek warships and at last building a relationship with his sister Klara, who's home after a failed marriage and brief career as an English teacher. Then Klara hires a gardener to breathe new life into their overgrown estate. There's something odd about him--something eerily reminiscent of their father's most violent villain. Or is Milo imagining things? He's not sure. That all changes the day the gardener discovers something startling in the woods. Suddenly Milo is fighting for his life, forced to confront the power of fictional identity as he uncovers the shocking truth about his own dysfunctional family--and the supposed accident that claimed his parents' lives.

"[A] taut mystery about how the lives we lead are forever changed by the stories we tell and the secrets we keep." -- Ramona Ausubel, award-winning author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty and No One is Here Except All of Us

"[T]his rich neo-gothic novel...captures us with an eerie power exactly like Henry James' governess and the stressed-out, dreamy extremists of Poe. Milo, the son, the brother, the watcher, the spy, had my sleeve fiercely in his fist the whole way." -- Ron Carlson, award-winning author of Five Skies

"[B]rilliantly probes the authorship of horror in its many arenas: history, war, parenting, nature, love, the imagination." -- Michelle Latiolais, award-winning author of Widow and She.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781630230890
Publisher:	Resurrection House
Publication date:	04/30/2019
Pages:	242
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.55(d)
Age Range:	14 Years

About the Author

Michael Barsa grew up in a German-speaking household in New Jersey and spoke no English until he went to school. So began an epic struggle to master the American “R” and a lifelong fascination with language. He’s lived on three continents and spent many summers in southern Germany and southern Vermont.


He’s worked as an award-winning grant writer, an English teacher, and an environmental lawyer. He’s now teaches environmental and natural resources law. His scholarly articles have appeared in several major law reviews, and his writing on environmental policy has appeared in The Chicago Tribune and The Chicago Sun-Times. His short fiction has appeared in Sequoia.


The Garden of Blue Roses is his first novel.

Editorial Reviews

04/15/2018
Barsa's first novel entwines literary arts, fear, and insanity into modern gothic horror. When Milo Crane is told that his father and mother have been killed in a car accident, he feels relief instead of grief. Famous reclusive horror novelist John Crane's nightly visits and gruesome demonstrations had caused Milo to fear each creak and shadow in their Vermont mansion. Milo believes he will finally never again be forced to experience the macabre details of his father's stories, but his hopes disintegrate when he sees his father lurking in every corner. Milo's sister Klara is determined to move on and hires famed gardener Henri Blanc to create a beautiful landscape in their father's memory. But Milo recognizes what Klara doesn't—that Henri bears the same scar and tattoo as one of his father's characters, a psychopathic artist who sculpted with body parts. Milo must prove to Klara that nothing is as it seems. As Milo discovers clues about Henri's intentions, he is sucked into a dark and demented story of fiction or reality; he's not sure. VERDICT Horror fans who enjoy Edgar Allan Poe with the modern touch of Stephen King will be kept off-kilter by this sinister psychological tale of twisted facts and damaged sanity.—K.L. Romo, Duncanville, TX

Library Journal

2018-02-06
Living with his sister, Klara, in the aftermath of their parents' deaths in a car accident, Milo Crane becomes fixated on the connection between Klara and Henri, an odd gardener who seems plucked from one of Milo's famous father's gruesome horror novels.Milo, who narrates the book, is obsessed with details. He spends much of his time building model Greek warships and shipmen. He was happy when Klara returned to their New England home following a brief failed marriage—never mind the profound state of sadness she was in. But her relationship with Henri, a supposed devotee of their father (who wrote novels such as Fair Weather Fiends in rhyming couplets, samples of which run through the novel), and the secrets she shares with the gardener drive Milo into a feverish state of distraction. Paranoia mixes with fact as discoveries Henri makes, including a trove of letters, upend accepted truths about the past. The story unfolds in a kind of hothouse atmosphere until actual events and made-up ones intertwine. None of the characters are to be trusted, least of all Milo (especially since he finds nothing funny about Some Like It Hot). At its best, the book bewitches even as it creates unease. There's an odd formality to the language, possibly a reflection of Barsa's being raised in a German household and not speaking English until he attended school. Fiction may be stranger than truth in some settings; in this one, truth keeps pace step for unsettling step.With his first novel, the influences of which include the gothic visions of Hawthorne, the morally charged horror of Shirley Jackson, and the twisty storytelling of Italo Calvino, Barsa emerges as a unique voice in contemporary fiction.

Kirkus Reviews