Jeff Cook

Posted on August 28, 2007
Filed Under Fiction

Jeff Cook pounces onto the literary scene with a fascinating first novel, Woe to the Hunted, that is one of the more interesting concepts in storytelling to grace the bookshelves in some time.

Cook is a writer, a composer, an inventor, a painter, a mathematician fascinated with physics, and while that may sound like a man who is a bit unfocused, for this his first literary adventure Jeff Cook employs all of these interests in an informed and polished manner.

‘The average bad memory haunts you…but a memory so horrible that your mind won’t allow you to even think of it, doesn’t haunt you. It hunts you. As it remains dormant through the years, you become increasingly unaware of its presence, though you somehow feel all along that something’s stalking you. Then one day, bang! Shot in the back.’

Six years from the time of the story a crisis occurred: two friends (Leonard and Shane) driving separate cars were in an auto accident with dire consequences. They both survived physically but both were bruised for life: Leonard became an artist whose edgy photographs are intended to ’shock the world’ bringing him some fame, while Shane entered seminary to find solace in the life of religion (’Is not the soul more than the body?’). They come together in Oakland, California in the most bizarre series of events populated with very colorful characters from the art world and from the heart world.

Leonard becomes involved in a breaking and entering crime that begins as an art project (placing a hidden camera to photograph a kid picking his nose in a school bathroom!) and becomes an ongoing police chase.

Shane bumps into Leonard at an art dealer’s home and the glances they exchange resurface the subliminal tensions present since the catastrophic crash. Shane’s entry into religious order has been his means of understanding what happened in that crash: Leonard’s immersion in the arts has been his mode of coping with what was inexplicable.

The tales of each man tumble around in an at times confusing narrative until the reader realizes that the author is playing mind games that result in a highly successful denouement and ending, an ending that carries significant intellectual and mystical weight in Cook’s deft writing style.

Though the underbelly of this unique novel is a serious story of how two disparate friends respond to the same crisis and are permanently affected in wildly different ways, the manner of telling the tale is in the magic of comedy.

Cook has a keen observing eye and an at times twisted viewpoint that quite matches the ‘artist mind mode’ so envied by we ordinary folk. His characters are very well drawn, plead entry into our psyches, and never cease to entertain us though their travels border closely on madness. Cook uses a technique of inserting italic bold phrases throughout the book, memory joggers of a sort or mind stimulators, if you will.

Though this is not a consistently polished work (some editing would keep the reader more propulsively involved), for a first novel it is a meaty, smart, immensely entertaining book, one that has the scent of a potential screenplay .

Review by Grady Harp, an Amazon Top 10 Reviewer

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