A Case in Point

FROM THE PUBLISHER - A CASE IN POINT . letters . diaries . old photographs . visits with strangers to talk about someone we love or think we love . there is a remarkable degeneration of character which takes place because of all the searching, prying, and gossiping, the suspicions generated and the facts uncovered by the narrator, Regis O’Rourke. Through a series of bizarre encounters and a breakdown of his untested moral standards, O’Rourke comes to learn the weird and grotesque truth about himself and about Claudette and Claude Belladonna, decadent Wildean twins who, for a dangerously long time, had attracted him, fascinated him, held him treacherously under their spell. The unwholesome and unholy sister and brother who had chanced O’Rourke’s way reflected each other like the dusk at the end of a dreary day or the last dark shadows of the night and they cast their baleful influence over his weak resolves. There is something freakish and frightening about the events of Coleman’s second novel. He guides us, as if on one of those amusement park rides, through haunted subterranean caverns of the damned: at the end of O’Rourke’s journey, past the horrors and fiends, having barely escaped with his life, he can never be quite the same.