STARRED Book Review: Bardo

IndieBookView

Oct 3

Bardo

by Joseph Edwin Haeger

Genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

ISBN: 9798986110578

Print Length: 96 pages

Publisher: Thirty West Publishing

Reviewed by Nick Rees Gardner

The first thing a reader will notice about Joseph Edwin Haeger's Bardo is the nonlinear structure. The novella begins with a section numbered 18, then jumps to section 26, and so on. There is little explanation about the choice of a scattered order, no dialogue tags, nothing for the reader to do but sink themselves into the first person narrator's confused headspace and work out the details as he parses through the loss of his son and his anger at the druggies who murdered his boy. The possible murderer also takes his turn at narrating, reliving a lifetime worth of guilt, regret, and ultimately fear of death. For a book filled with drugs and violence, Bardo is surprisingly quiet, guiding the reader through ghostly landscapes with a ruminative tone.

First, there is a father who watches his son's killer being put to death. But what if the man who received the lethal injection was not the real murderer? What if his cries for innocence weren't desperate lies? Uncertainty blooms in the father's considerations, facts obscured by a deep seated anger as he searches out his son's true killer. At the same time, in flashbacks, the man who was put to death considers the desperate crimes he committed in life and the blackout he experienced the night of the son's murder. Past and present weave together to display these two men's uncertainty: Is anyone any longer innocent?