The
Three Sunrises
Edward Mullany. Publishing Genius
Press, $16.95 paperback (on sale for $13.95) (408p) ISBN
13: 978-0-9906020-2-6
If
you’re familiar with Edward Mullany’s previous books or his comics, you’re no
stranger to his balance of humor and creeping dread, how one image can give you
a feeling you can’t quite place. His
trilogy within a trilogy, The Three
Sunrises, continues his previous works’ apocalyptic themes, offering
conclusion without resolution. While Mullany’s first two books in the trilogy were
poetry collections, The Three Sunrises
is a collection of three novellas. It’s as
epic as three apocalyptic books in one can be, but it’s also quiet. You leave the book feeling you’ve been on a journey,
but you don’t feel the weight of 400 pages.
The
first novella, “Legion,” is told in short chapters. It starts out episodic and becomes more and
more linear as we follow a first person narrator through his day to day. There is always something a little off with
his world, and the story is peppered with absurdity, wit, and terror—from a
run-in on the subway to screwdrivers falling from the sky to not remembering a
single instant of buying dish soap—as we edge toward his world’s demise.
The
second, “The Book of Numbers,” is a straight narrative, but the twists and the
stops and starts are anything but straight.
This journey story transitions the way dreams do as we find ourselves in
stranger and stranger worlds with imagery reminiscent of Revelations. But it’s a
journey that leads us back to beginnings and back to middles that made this
reader feel she and the characters were in purgatory, which feels appropriate
for the middle story.
The
final novella, “The Three Sunrises,” returns to short chapters as the narrator
tracks a man who is his exact double through the city. As we’ve come to expect from the book, this is
only the beginning of our narrator’s journey.
In fact, many of the characters throughout the book become desensitized
to the twists in their stories, commenting that it would be stranger if
something didn’t happen.
What
makes these stories stand out among other journeys to the end (or to the
never-ending) is the narration. Whether
in first of third person, the voice is polite.
It’s observational and measured, whether discussing the mundane or the
biblical. Even when expressing emotion,
there is a remove as the narrators rephrase sentences, searching for accuracy
over pathos. And this not only adds to
the peculiarity of the characters, but it also lets the image and action take
over. Often the narrator ends a scene
right when a different kind of story would push forward to action and
rumination. Instead, we are left to
finish the scene or the meaning. We are
left to laugh, shudder, or—more often—both. (June 2015)
Purchase
The Three Sunrises HERE.
Reviewer
bio: Christy Crutchfield is the author of the novel How
to Catch a Coyote. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Mississippi Review, Salt Hill Journal, Juked,
and others. Visit her at christycrutchfield.com
