He has travelled extensively and lived in Dublin and London, but currently resides in California.Clevenger applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Mother Howl, and reported the following:
From page 69:Visit Craig Clevenger's website.
“Icarus kept on but the stranger called out again, then blocked his path. A wiry man much shorter than Icarus himself, he moved as though caught in some invisible undertow, fighting against the phantom riptide to remain in place.”
Having recently slipped through the grip of a county psych hospital—thanks to recent shudder from California’s San Andreas fault—Icarus makes his way through a part of the city hardest hit by the damage, where the indigent living beneath freeway overpasses and bridge trestles scour the post-quake wreckage.
Since this particular page is a brief transition between major scenes, Page 69 test does not give a reader a hint of the whole story (I’m not sure any single page would). Mother Howl is two narratives woven together; Icarus is the secondary protagonist in the secondary narrative. And this particular page falls dead between two major events for him.
While page 69 may not serve as a proper DNA swab of the whole story, it does give us the world as seen through the eyes of Icarus. In his brief time on Earth (by his account), he’s been stuffed and cuffed following an alleged suicide attempt (which he denies), remanded to a psych ward, and nursed back to health following his escape by an underground street surgeon. Page 69 is the first, long look at the world for Icarus since his arrival, and it speaks to his regard for human beings and their own regard for one another.
Q&A with Craig Clevenger.
--Marshal Zeringue
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