DARK NARRATIVE OF A GREAT WRITER
A Review of Jack Random’s WASICHU: THE KILLING SPIRIT
By Jake Berry
[The] opening pages of The Killing Spirit read and sound like an amalgam of Dashiell Hammett and Bob Dylan. The clipped sentences flow like measures of music singing off the page. After the first paragraph the reader feels thrown into a cold rushing stream – the stream of a man’s life and heritage, of history, myth and inevitability.
Dark times will produce a dark narrative and its singer. Jack Random is perfectly suited for those times. Though this does not mean the writing lacks tenderness. In the character of Jerico Whitehorse he has distilled the ages to bring the process full circle. Evan as Jerico is a dreamer of profound insight and reader of those dreams, Random is the teller of the tale, the reader of the auguries now so abundant in the air around us. Ishmael leads us to Ahab and his cursed destiny to destroy the beast that maimed him. Jerico follows the depths of collective memory to meet Tohocua who would be damned in his attempt to repel the European invasions. Tohocua’s hatred is certainly more justified but he is equally fated, even by the elements, to disappear.
The question before us and before Jerico is how to live with this knowledge. Does the key lie at the terminus of the great river and the mysteries of New Orleans – a city that has died and been reborn many times? Only Jack Random can tell us, and he will, in a voice that carries the gift of all great writers – it awakens us to the full presence of what it means to be human.
ANCIENT WISDOM
A Comment on Jack Random’s WASICHU: THE KILLING SPIRIT
By Chris Mansel
The writing of Jack Random is at once effortless, mysterious and utterly powerful. When I was eighteen I spent some time in New Mexico and I can tell you the solitude and eerie silence is captured in Random’s writing as well as the feeling I get when I visit the end of the Trail of Tears in Waterloo, Alabama. The feeling of ancient wisdom and modern warnings.
