Among the Dead and Dreaming
"A masterful exhibition in storytelling; a breathless page-turner. Ligon drives his narrative like a formula one racer. Buckle your seat belts and get ready for a thrilling ride."--Jonathan Evison, West of Here
"Part meditation on modern love's dark and often unexamined underbelly; part can't-put-it-down-even-for-a-dinner-break-thriller, this novel contains one of the most convincingly and complicatedly terrifying fictional characters I have run into."--Pam Houston, Contents May Have Shifted
"A wildly original love story, a ghost story, a tense and suspenseful story in which the wickedly talented Ligon channels voices--of the lost, the longing, and the damned."--Jess Walter, We Live in Water
Praise for Safe in Heaven Dead:
"A superbly convincing first novel....An expertly motivated debut."--Kirkus, starred review
"This debut novel instantly seizes and holds the imagination."--Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Ligon is firmly in control, laying out the elements of the story like the pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle."--New York Times Book Review
Nikki has spent her life running from her abusive mother and the violent boyfriend she killed years ago, and now from his brother, Burke, just released from prison. Burke doesn't know yet how his brother died, but he's obsessed with finding Nikki and claiming her--and her daughter--as his own. Now she's run out of room to run.
Samuel Ligon is the author of Safe in Heaven Dead (HarperCollins, 2003) and Drift and Swerve. His stories have appeared in more than twenty literary journals. He teaches at Eastern Washington University's Inland Northwest Center for Writers, and is the editor of Willow Springs.
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" Ligon is able to move between charactersthe living, the dead, the barely-there, the unbornand inhabit each voice with a pace and precision that makes the prose move, too. He begins by conducting the spare moments before a motorcycle crash through the voice of one of its pregnant victims, and in the span of three pages, orchestrates the thought-process of four other characters, including the unborn baby, Isabelle, whose solitary Oh delivers the single biggest understatement of the book, a caustic pause before we become submerged in a narrative of returns and remunerations, a postmodern ghost story set in New York City." The Brooklyn Rail
"Lost love and complex human nature are at the center of this novel about recovering from the past.... Ligon's is a convincing presentation of human nature." Foreword Reviews
"Ligon has pulled off an intricately interwoven novel that is both a gripping page-turner and also a deeply felt exploration of the most piercing kinds of pain." New York Journal of Books"
"Ligon handles this latticework with impressive fluidity and dramatic momentum, the disparate voices lacing the novel with the melancholy of aborted and fractured love, whether between lovers or between children and their parents. When a psychiatrist tells Mark that the sick and dying live in a world the healthy can t inhabit or comprehend, we grasp that divide at the same time we question whether anyone in this world is healthy." --New York Times Book Review
" Ligon is able to move between charactersthe living, the dead, the barely-there, the unbornand inhabit each voice with a pace and precision that makes the prose move, too. He begins by conducting the spare moments before a motorcycle crash through the voice of one of its pregnant victims, and in the span of three pages, orchestrates the thought-process of four other characters, including the unborn baby, Isabelle, whose solitary Oh delivers the single biggest understatement of the book, a caustic pause before we become submerged in a narrative of returns and remunerations, a postmodern ghost story set in New York City." The Brooklyn Rail
"Lost love and complex human nature are at the center of this novel about recovering from the past.... Ligon's is a convincing presentation of human nature." Foreword Reviews
"Ligon has pulled off an intricately interwoven novel that is both a gripping page-turner and also a deeply felt exploration of the most piercing kinds of pain." New York Journal of Books
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"Ligon handles this latticework with impressive fluidity and dramatic momentum, the disparate voices lacing the novel with the melancholy of aborted and fractured love, whether between lovers or between children and their parents. When a psychiatrist tells Mark that "the sick and dying live in a world the healthy can't inhabit or comprehend," we grasp that divide at the same time we question whether anyone in this world is healthy." --New York Times Book Review, Vu Tran " Ligon is able to move between characters--the living, the dead, the barely-there, the unborn--and inhabit each voice with a pace and precision that makes the prose move, too. He begins by conducting the spare moments before a motorcycle crash through the voice of one of its pregnant victims, and in the span of three pages, orchestrates the thought-process of four other characters, including the unborn baby, Isabelle, whose solitary "Oh" delivers the single biggest understatement of the book, a caustic pause before we become submerged in a narrative of returns and remunerations, a postmodern ghost story set in New York City." --The Brooklyn Rail "Lost love and complex human nature are at the center of this novel about recovering from the past.... Ligon's is a convincing presentation of human nature." --Foreword Reviews "Ligon has pulled off an intricately interwoven novel that is both a gripping page-turner and also a deeply felt exploration of the most piercing kinds of pain." --New York Journal of Books
