Books in Brief: The Hunter’s Moon

The Hunter’s Moon, by Nathaniel Benchley (Little, Brown, 244 pp., $6.95).

The New England village of Pembroke is home for Nathaniel Benchley’s crew of wax-museum, smalltown stereotypes, among them a pair of poachers who like a little rape on the side; a professional photographer whose pictorial preferences are polaroidally predictable; and a garbage man, who keeps track of his customers’ liquor consumption, named Melvin Laird (obviously some satire intended here, but it’s so obscure that the swill picker might as well be called Pierre Salinger). There’s a sex murder, the villagers get themselves up in arms, and the hero, an unbelievable, wooden refugee who keeps muttering about parallels between Nazi Germany and Pembroke, gets himself shot. Moral? It probably runs something like this: law and order is often the battle cry of the least lawful and orderly among us. Maybe. But the trouble is the people of Pembroke are such creeps that we really don’t give a damn whether they all shoot one another or not. In fact, after a couple of hundred pages, we’re all secretly wishing that the real Melvin Laird had declared Pembroke an ICBM impact range.

JC

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J. R. Coyne Jr.

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The Hunter’s Moon, by Nathaniel Benchley (Little, Brown, 244 pp., $6.95).

The New England village of Pembroke is home for Nathaniel Benchley’s crew of wax-museum, smalltown stereotypes, among them a pair of poachers who like a little rape on the side; a professional photographer whose pictorial preferences are polaroidally predictable; and a garbage man, who keeps track of his customers’ liquor consumption, named Melvin Laird (obviously some satire intended here, but it’s so obscure that the swill picker might as well be called Pierre Salinger). There’s a sex murder, the villagers get themselves up in arms, and the hero, an unbelievable, wooden refugee who keeps muttering about parallels between Nazi Germany and Pembroke, gets himself shot. Moral? It probably runs something like this: law and order is often the battle cry of the least lawful and orderly among us. Maybe. But the trouble is the people of Pembroke are such creeps that we really don’t give a damn whether they all shoot one another or not. In fact, after a couple of hundred pages, we’re all secretly wishing that the real Melvin Laird had declared Pembroke an ICBM impact range.