News

Collins' 'Lost Souls' hits stores on Thursday

By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Tuesday, August 3, 2004 10:35 AM EDT

"Lost Souls," the novel from which Michael Collins read a couple of chapters at the Dogwood Fine Arts Festival at Southwestern Michigan College May 11, hits stores Thursday.

It became a bestseller in Europe after its publication there last September.

Collins, who lives in Bellingham, Wash., May 11 also presented his first writing prizes for fiction and poetry to six Union High School students, enriching a relationship with Dowagiac which began with a talk to DUHS students in April 1995 - his first of four appearances here.

In establishing writing prizes, Collins recalled his own encouragement from winning a fishing pole for a milk essay.

"A prize such as this hopefully will spark something in one or two students that years later they'll look back and say, 'Maybe I have it in me to be a writer or a poet.' That's my genesis," he said.

Collins returned in October 2001 to promote "The Keepers of Truth," shortlisted for the 2000 Booker Prize - Great Britain's highest literary award.

Margaret Atwood, who spoke at Central Middle School May 14, won for "The Blind Assassin."

Collins, who has been called "the thinking man's John Grisham," returned in November 2002 to talk about "The Resurrectionists," another Michigan murder mystery.

"Lost Souls" completes a sort of small-town Midwest trilogy which walks a tightrope between indicting American culture while compassionately examining the plight of people struggling to overcome crimes and burdens of their pasts.

The novel's central image is a 3-year-old girl costumed as an angel and found in a pile of leaves on Halloween - apparently killed by a car after a night of trick or treating. Its narrator, Lawrence, is a depressed cop in a struggling town. The chief suspect in her death is Kyle Johnson, star quarterback of the high school football team.

Collins sets his story in the gloomy darkness of advancing Midwest winter.

The mayor makes speeches about loss in middle America in this town adrift. One reviewer called it the flip side of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town."

As evidence piles up, the police chief and mayor pressure Lawrence to help cover up Johnson's role in the crime.

Lawrence goes along, seized by guilt, and takes off on his own to keep watch over the mother of the dead child.

Then Johnson's girlfriend, Cheryl Carpenter, is found murdered.

As more killings ravage the town, plot twists cast Lawrence as both suspect and potential victim.

"Collins' style, which alternates between the clipped prose of a cop novel and some surreally introspective passages, gives the book the prose feel of a David Lynch film," Publishers Weekly says.

Lynch created TV's groundbreaking "Twin Peaks."

In "The Keepers of Truth," a 2002 New York Times Notable Book, Collins drew on time spent in recessionary Michiana while attending Notre Dame on a running scholarship from 1983-1987 to set his examination of American industrial decay. He mentioned Cass County by name.

Collins' character Bill is the last remaining member of a once prominent family in a dying town where "our men used to manufacture cars, sheet metal, mobile homes, washers and dryers. We had hands throbbing to make things ... Now, we are a town of trainee managers. Oh, happy are ye that inherit the deep-fat fryer!"

Before the low-carb craze took over, we ate to fill that industrial void.

"We take hold of burgers mostly, in a carnivorous display of sublimated longing for our dead machines," Collins writes.

As a print journalist, Bill feels like a baker selling day-old doughnuts.

He works for the local newspaper, The Daily Truth, where he publishes mind-numbing reports about bake sales and high school sports while eloquent essays on the physical and moral decline of the United States languish in obscurity on his desk.

"The Keepers of Truth" was named Book of the Year by both The London Times and The Guardian and became a bestseller in several European countries, including France, which even then was trying to understand America.

Publishers Weekly called that novel an "arresting, frequently creepy tale of an America not often viewed."

The Irish Times said, "Thoroughly edgy, thoroughly enjoyable, The Keepers of Truth is an impressive performance from a rich and unpredictable talent."

His desire to escape Ireland's "Troubles" drove him to sneak into the United States from Canada after his junior year of high school and work in a New York City slaughterhouse, which he chronicled in the semi-autobiographical 1998 novel, "The Emerald Underground."

Michael observed much driving around the United States running races for money.

Living in rest areas, he encountered weird characters on the fringe of society and soaked in the "bigness" of the United States.

He describes this feeling of wide open spaces lacerated with lightning on the road in "The Resurrectionists," then with nimble agility shifts to the claustrophobia of the bathroom, Frank committing a robbery with a finger jabbed in another man's back.

He transcends the typical murder mystery by setting "The Resurrectionists" in an arc that encompasses the paranoid cold war 1950s to the 1970s as history recycles itself.

"The Resurrectionists" portrays one wayward family's search for salvation in an America that left them behind.

He once heard a statistic that 20,000 people are killed every year and wondered who they were.

Frank Cassidy was 5 years old when his parents burned to death in a remote Michigan town. Nearly 30 years later, he is stuck with an unfaithful wife, Honey, and an endless series of degrading menial jobs.

When a mysterious stranger shoots his uncle dead and cousins lay claim to the family farm, Frank ferries his family north in a series of stolen cars to dispute property rights. Once there, however, he also wants questions about his own past laid to rest. Its dark humor would be at home in "Fargo."

Michael grew up in Limerick, Ireland, the same city that produced Dowagiac visitors Frank and Malachy McCourt.

He saw his first book, "The Man Who Dreamt of Lobsters," named a New York Times Notable Book in 1993, the year the Dogwood Fine Arts Festival began with Kurt Vonnegut its first visiting author.

Collins has been a software programmer for Microsoft and an extreme athlete who competes in Arctic marathons.

Running gave him discipline necessary for writing. Growing up he was more interested in computers than writing, though he credits his mother with sparking an interest in literature with books and stories she told.

He amused himself by making up stories as he kept pace - places seen, people observed, things felt and imagined.

He is also Dr. Collins, with a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois.

He and his wife, Heidi, have two children.

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