The World's Smallest Bible

by Dennis Must

Overview

The World’s Smallest Bible chronicles the seriocomic boyhood of Ethan and Jeremiah Mueller in mill town Pennsylvania during the height of World War II. As they lose friends and neighbors to the front lines, the boys try to make sense of the mounting darkness with their imaginations—except in their world, no one ever dies. In a private, laconic language, they invent stories that mirror the irrational world around them: a chaplain with bad news becomes the Angel of Death, skeletal Nazis lurk around the corner, and the ghost of a dead playmate taps at their bedroom window in the night. With startling lyricism and narrative grace, Dennis Must has fashioned an indelible vision of the Mueller boys’ blighted youth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597099721
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	03/15/2014
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Dennis Must is the author of two short story collections: Oh, Don’t Ask Why (Red Hen Press, 2007) and Banjo Grease (Creative Arts Book Company, 2000). His plays have been performed Off-Off-Broadway, and his fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals. He has worked as a cabinetmaker, short-order cook, lightning rod installer, florist, bartender, bellhop, and as a general laborer in a glass factory, in a steel mill, on highway construction, and on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. For over a decade, he was Executive Vice President of Corporate Space, Inc., a commercial real estate firm in Boston he co-founded. He lives in Salem, Massachusetts.

Editorial Reviews

01/06/2014
This debut novel from Must, who has previously written short stories and plays, retains many of the characteristics of those mediums. Chronological scenes from the lives of the two Mueller boys—little brother Jeremiah and big brother Ethan, Must’s grown-up narrator—read like vivid set pieces viewed through the scrim of adulthood. Must opens at a moment of crisis for Ethan: the blue-collar Pennsylvania mill town he calls home has begun to lose its young men to World War II, and their ghosts, among others, torment him. Must homes in on the special bond those fears cement between Ethan and Jeremiah. He then fast-forwards to the boys’ discovery of a murky dichotomy at home between their mother’s religious fervor and their father’s philandering; flashpoints in their sexual coming-of-age; Ethan’s fascination with a Polish neighbor, a scrap-metal artist with an imagination beyond his means; and, finally, the rift that grows between Ethan and Jeremiah. There are too many characters and the sometimes theatrical diction can be distracting, but in tracking how our closest relationships change with age and loss, Must composes an honest portrait of brotherly love. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Told in startling, poetic language, The World’s Smallest Bible is an ode to the power of the imagination, as two boys in a Pennsylvania town during WWII sustain each other with stories and fabulist visions. Their struggle with the real world—the war, teachers, their parents—runs through The World’s Smallest Bible like an obbligato. Dennis Must skillfully combines narrative momentum with lyricism resulting in a novel of extraordinary grace and originality.”
—Thaisa Frank, author of Heidegger’s Glasses

“What a wild and wonderful trip The World’s Smallest Bible is. It’s like Sherwood Anderson territory glimpsed through the prism of Kafka’s consciousness. The story’s at once otherworldly, yet also very much of this world, the world of ‘bang and blab’ as Roethke puts it—the feverish fluctuations between the two elements I see as a cardinal strength of the work. And the storyteller’s neighbor’s perpetual motion machine seemed to me a potent symbol/metaphor of all our tangled hopes, aspirations, audacities, fears and obsessions; it is utterly fascinating with all its physical oddities and contrarieties, embodying something important to us all.”
—Geoffrey Clark, author of Two, Two, Lily-White Boys, Necessary Deaths, Wedding in October, and Jackdog Summer
“In this darkly comic Bildungsroman, Ethan Daugherty, initially plagued by several manifestations of moral evil—both imagined and real—comes to understand one indisputable existential truth: The restrictive confines of place—in this case, Hebron, Pennsylvania, toxic in practically every respect—can maim the soul, kill the human spirit. Reminiscent of Zola, The World’s Smallest Bible brilliantly demonstrates that for all one’s attempts, whether ignoble or noble, to escape one’s seemingly appointed lot, the only way out may be the grave.”
—Jack Smith, author of Hog to Hog
“The World’s Smallest Bible is that too rare and beautiful combination of a literary novel that is also a page-turner. It somehow manages to be narratively ambitious, while the writing comes across as effortless. The World’s Smallest Bible is an excellent book. An enormous pleasure to read, and a novel I’d recommend to anyone.”
—Rob Roberge, author of The Cost of Living, Working Backwards from the Worst Moment of My Life, and More Than They Could Chew
 

From the Publisher

03/01/2014
This dark novel from Must (Oh, Don't Ask Why; Banjo Grease) chronicles the lives of two brothers spending their horrendous boyhood with their family in a small Pennsylvania town during World War II. Attempting to disengage from their dysfunctional home life, the boys yearn for something never made quite clear and become as obsessed with overblown religiosity, superstition, and bestiality as the rest of the townspeople. Who knows what beset this misbegotten town? Perhaps the toxic fog of waste fires burning nonstop in its quarries. VERDICT A snarl of past, present, and future, real and imagined, saturated with degenerate sexuality. Not for those seeking a light, fun read.—Joyce Townsend, Pittsburg, CA

Library Journal