Core — Kassten Alonso

THIS INTENSE AND COMPACT NOVEL crackles with obsession, betrayal, and madness, and was an Oregon Book Award Finalist for fiction 2005. As the narrator becomes fixated on his best friend's girlfriend, his precarious hold on sanity rapidly deteriorates into delusion and violence. This story can be read as the classic myth of Hades and Persephone (Core) rewritten for a twenty-first century audience as well as a dark, foreboding tale of unrequited love and loneliness. Alonso skillfully uses language to imitate memory and psychosis, putting the reader squarely inside the narrator's head. In addition, deliberate misuse of standard punctuation blurs the distinction between the narrator's internal and external worlds. A sense of alienation and Faulknerian grotesquerie permeate this landscape where desire is borne in the bloom of a daffodil and sanity lies toppled like an applecart in the mud.