A novel by Jonathan Carroll.
Popular author Sam Bayer, overcome by writer's block, returns to
his small, idyllic upstate New York hometown Crane's View to find
inspiration. He ends up investigating a 30-year-old murder
case - the death of a girl whose body he discovered as a
teenager. As skeletons of the past start crawling out of the woodwork
and cracks appear in the serene facade of Crane's View, Bayer suddenly has to
deal with a killer obsessed with his work, come to terms with his
childhood experiences and sort out his troubled relationship with the
mysterious Veronica Lake.
Markedly different from the main body of Jonathan Carroll work in the
sense that it utilizes no overt fantastical elements, Kissing the
Beehive is perhaps best described as an autobiographical
psychological thriller. Like Bayer, Carroll discovered the body of a
dead girl when he was a teenager, and it is evident that he shares
Bayer's nostalgia for a lost childhood in the innocent apple-pie
America of the 1950s - not surprising considering that Carroll
has lived in Vienna for years. Although the fireworks of imagination
usually present in his work are absent from Kissing the Beehive, it
is nevertheless a strong novel, carried by well realized characters
and terse plotting - not to mention Carroll's very distinctive and
powerful narrator's voice.