Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 9, 1993 TAG: 9305090240
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MIKE MAYO BOOK PAGE EDITOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"Pomona Queen" is pure Southern Gothic; a long hot summer night of madness and memory, a journey in search of lost love and innocence, an overwritten alcohol-soaked meditation on death and ancestors and redemption . . . in short, all the things that have made Southern fiction so Southern.
The fact that the setting is Southern California doesn't change that.
Kem Nunn's Yoknapatawpha County is Pomona, a town whose dreams have died by degrees; first with the disease that killed the orange groves and then with the boom-and-bust real estate market that has left half-empty developments of cheap tract houses and abandoned shopping malls.
But it's still home for Earl Dean, aka Johnny Magic. Pomona is the place where his great-grandfather made a fortune, now squandered by the family. Earl's inheritance, such as it is, has been stolen from him by his step-father, and so Earl has been reduced to selling Cyclone Air Purifiers (glorified vacuum cleaners) in the faint hope that he can earn enough to reclaim his birthright.
That leads Dean, in his '62 Falcon station wagon, to a weed- choked address in a bleak suburb:
"Dean pulled to the side of the road and looked down the narrow drive. The carport was empty, its grease-spattered floor shining in the light. There were half a dozen yellowed newspapers in the drive and a pair of big chopped scooters parked on what was left of the grass. The scooters were not of the variety to set a man's mind at ease. There were some tools in the yard, near the bikes, and a tire leaned up against the fence, which had been built to screen off the front of the house. Behind the house a pair of ancient palms scratched at the sky, their fronds tipped with silver in the scant moonlight."
In the night that follows, Dean is forced to face his past. He falls in with a ghost from his youth, Dan Brown, one of those high school legends of delinquency who has grown into a truly frightening adult.
Brown is faced with something of a moral dilemma. It seems that a young woman has stabbed his brother - the body is on ice in a big Coke cooler in the living room - but for reasons best not explained, Brown needs someone else to exact revenge. Dean is available. Is it some kind of cosmic coincidence that this lethal "sword maiden" leads a band called "Pomona Queen," the very name that Dean's great-grandfather had chosen for his oranges?
And what of Rayann, the beautiful girl from Dean's past? He says that she's dead, but he might have reason to lie.
Nunn answers all those questions and several others before the sun rises on Dean. His prose is florid, and his sense of humor is sharply honed. Whenever the story begins to take itself too seriously (always a danger in this kind of fiction), Nunn deflates it with a quick jab.
In the end, "Pomona Queen" won't eclipse "Tapping the Source," Nunn's brilliant debut, but it's a fine, well-crafted work. Recommended.
by CNB