Pilgrims Upon the Earth
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Brad Land’s acclaimed memoir, Goat, was a riveting, brilliantly crafted account of masculinity, violence, and brotherhood. Now here is Land’s remarkable fiction debut, a haunting novel of a stark, troubled coming-of-age.
At fifteen, Terry Webber hovers uneasily between child and man. His father, the second-shift foreman at the textile plant in their South Carolina town, is too tired to pay Terry much mind. Their relationship lies stagnant and silent; neither is willing to acknowledge the hole Terry’s mother left in their lives when she killed herself only months after Terry’s birth.
Terry wanders aimlessly through school, trying to fill his days as best he can. When he meets Alice Washington, he is immediately drawn to her enigmatic and vibrant spirit. Together, they seek a way out of their numbing existence and set out for Alice’s sister’s commune in Colorado, in pursuit of an existence free of parents and restrictions. Yet when a brutal accident occurs, Terry is left reeling. As he slips further into depths of destruction, drugs, and violence, Terry grapples to make sense of all that has come before in order to find a future worth living.
Told in spare, hypnotic prose and a raw, distinctive voice, Pilgrims Upon the Earth is a mesmerizing odyssey through heartbreak and isolation–a luminously written examination of fathers and sons, displacement and brutality, loss and young love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Land's 2004 memoir, Goat, which told of his abduction and beating at the hands of two hitchhikers as well as the fraternity hazing he suffered at Clemson University, portrayed a powerless postadolescent male at odds with a violent culture. A similar theme informs his glum first novel, a plodding study of teenage angst featuring 15-year-old Terry Webber, who lives in a South Carolina textile factory town with his shift foreman father (his mother committed suicide when Terry was a toddler). Terry smokes a lot (cigarettes, pot), fights with his dad and ritually cuts himself. He falls for Alice Washington, an odd girl who, apropos of nothing, says things like: "Could you be still with me? When everything else is so loud I fall down?" The two light out for Colorado where Alice's sister lives on a commune, but Alice abruptly dies in a car wreck. The death and a move to yet another crap town sends Terry spiraling. Without much narrative direction, attention is drawn to the spare prose, which has a Prozac flatness.
