The Lost and the Blind

by Curtis Smith

Overview

Mark Hayes has come up hard. Poverty. Chaos. Hunger. His mother a junkie. His father serving a life sentence. But as his senior year looms, Mark finds a bit of peace with his mother and her girlfriend in a farmhouse outside town. Here, he hopes to escape the upheaval that has dogged him since the day he was born, but as hard as he tries, he can’t outrun his shadows. He is lost, but no more so than many of his friends, no more so than the institutions he navigates or his country as it spirals toward another bloody war. Mark doesn’t know God, but as he stumbles through his long, violent night, he is guided by glimmers of kindness, the good souls who reach out to this life’s lost sheep. Delivered in prose both terse and lyrical, The Lost and the Blind presents a searing portrait of dopesick, small-town America and a young man desperate to rise above.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781955062619
Publisher:	Running Wild Press
Publication date:	09/05/2023
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Curtis Smith’s award-winning stories and essays have appeared in over 150 literary journals, and his work has been cited by or included in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The Best American Spiritual Writing, The Best Small Fictions, The Best Microfictions, and the WW Norton anthology New Micro. He is the author of six novels, five story collections, two essay collections, and a book of creative nonfiction. His last novel, The Magpie’s Return, was cited by Kirkus Reviews as one of the 2020 Best Indie Books of the Year.

Editorial Reviews

"The Lost and the Blind is the dark, hypnotic, and beautiful story of 17-year-old Mark Hayes, the son of a convict father and addict mother, who is trying to assemble a life for himself when all the options he’s been offered are brutal and deadly. Against the backdrop of an unnamed war and domestic unrest, we follow and hope as Mark begins to understand the people and systems he’s been born into and claim what belongs to him alone." —Pamela Erens, author of The Virgins and Matasha.

"A stunning and harrowing novel." —Pamela Painter, author of Fabrications: New and Selected Stories.

"In the poignant novel The Lost and the Blind, despondent people do their best to escape their burdens." —Foreword Reviews

“The Lost and the Blind is the dark, hypnotic, and beautiful story of 17-year-old Mark Hayes, the son of a convict father and addict mother, who is trying to assemble a life for himself when all the options he’s been offered are brutal and deadly. Against the backdrop of an unnamed war and domestic unrest, we follow and hope as Mark begins to understand the people and systems he’s been born into and claim what belongs to him alone.” —Pamela Erens, author of The Virgins and Matasha

“A stunning and harrowing novel.” —Pamela Painter, author of Fabrications: New and Selected Stories

From the Publisher

2023-09-14
In Smith’s novel, a high school senior grapples with the fear of what his future holds while dealing with the struggles of living with a drug-addicted mother.

Here, the author of the Kirkus-starred The Magpie’s Return(2020) explores a complex story of how children suffer the consequences of their parents’ actions. Mark Hayes is a 17-year-old who’s about to start his last year of school. He and his mom, Jill, have recently escaped a dangerous man who threatened to kill them, and are staying at a farmhouse somewhere in the Midwest where Jill’s addict friend, Amy, lives. By the end of summer, Mark notes, his mom doesn’t even try to hide it from him when she shoots up anymore. At one point, Amy’s parents take legal custody of her baby after a doctor find drugs in the child’s system. At home, Mark takes care of both adults; at school, he spends his lunches talking to U.S. Army recruiters and wonders what his life will look like after graduation, as he feels trapped in an endless cycle. People know who his mother is, which sometimes puts him in dangerous situations. Smith’s story takes place over roughly a year, but there’s never a lull in the action, and his sentences break apart in unusual and unexpected places to create a constant lyrical flow: “She drives off, and in me, a drowning I hadn’t expected. Open fields beneath an open sky. My house of empty rooms.” There’s also a colorful cast of characters, from Mark’s crew of friends at school—Andy, Derrick, Jason—his crush, Kate Evans, and the many people trying to hurt or help his mother and Amy. Many figures in Mark’s life offer him hope and a chance at a better future, but in the end, it’s up to him to decide to take it.

An engaging and often beautiful work.

Kirkus Reviews